Plot Medics 

This is an idea that has been around for a while and decided to surface today.  It was written in about an hour - which may be obvious. 

Out of Mind - 697 Words

Jacob Frimley examined his soft, manicured hands.  “I do hope everything’s clean,” he said.
“Of course,” the woman in the starched white uniform said.  She had a slightly 1940’s look, her hair in a smooth roll, her lipstick bright red.  She also looked tired, and older than she’d sounded on the phone, her eyes sunken, lines cutting down either side of that gleaming mouth.  The label on her lapel said; ‘Letitia Bramling, Supervisor.’
“At these prices…” Frimley said.
“We endeavour to provide complete satisfaction.”
Frimley snorted.  He knew those kind of words, he’d used them himself, they could be a neat way of avoiding responsibility while pretending to take it.
He looked around.  Outside, the ‘Golden Acres Retirement Home’ was a brute concrete box, like so many of them; little more than a storage facility.  Inside, once you got past the outer rooms, it was done out like a classy hotel: fresh flowers, staff with just the right level of obsequy.  Only a few of the residents were visible; pottering gently around or sitting blank-faced in their chairs.  It was a beautiful spring day; he could see a few staff taking the sun in the grounds, but no residents.
Bramling stood with her hands folded, a monument to patience. 
 “Let’s get to it, then,” he said.  As they walked along the corridor he marvelled at the size of the place; it seemed to go on forever.  “Where do you get them all?” 
“An ageing population, Mr Frimley.  They have to go somewhere, and where better than here?  Here, at least, they are still able to be of some value to the working population.  Earn their keep, as it were.”  She was moving too slowly for him, walking like an old woman herself.
Frimley felt the warm build of excitement in the base of his stomach.  Some value, indeed.  Most of them were probably having the time of their lives here; if they were still capable of appreciating it; he wouldn’t mind betting that the circumstances they lived in now were a damn sight more comfortable than their previous miserable little lives.  The place had to be kept nice, of course, for visitors like himself.
“You’re absolutely sure,” Frimley said, “that there can be no complications?  No backlash?”
“So long as you followed our instructions,” Bramling said, “there should be nothing.  And a man such as yourself, with your expert financial experience, should have had no problems making sure the donation was not tracked.”
Was that a dig?  Frimley decided, magnanimously, to ignore it.  Donation, indeed.  That was one word for it.
“And we know you weren’t followed,” she said.  “It’s quite all right, Mr Frimley.  Really.  No-one knows you’re here at all.”
She opened the door.
The room was clean and fresh-scented: the old woman lying in the big bed looked tiny, dried up and fragile as a leaf, ready to blow away on the wind. 
“The agreement was for two hours,” Bramling said.  “If you decide to stay longer, we will require a larger donation, obviously.  The items you requested are in the cupboard on the left.”  She folded her hands again. He hadn’t noticed before but her hands seemed veiny, rootlike, ancient.
“And I can…” he swallowed.
“Mr Frimley, you have paid, I know, a great deal of money.  You can do anything you like.  That’s what we’re here for.  That’s what they’re here for.  Now, is there anything else you require?”
“No,” he said, looking at the figure on the bed.  “No, thank you.”
Bramling smiled, blandly, and closed the door.
Frimley walked towards the bed.

***

Letitia Bramling opened the door, and rolled her eyes.  The place was a state.  Blood everywhere.  “Ethel,” she said.
“Oh, hello, dear.  I’m sorry about the mess.”  Ethel sat up.  She was plump, bright-eyed, juicy as a steak. 
“You’re a disgrace.  Where is it?”
Ethel got out of bed, her bloodsoaked cotton nightgown clinging to her rounded belly, and kicked something towards the supervisor.  It was a dried brown husk, in a suit.
“You look tired, dear.  I’ll get the cleaning crew,” Ethel said.  “And then, I think, it will be your turn for the next one.”

This one comes from a dream fragment.

Three Blue Things (658 words)

It started with a little girl’s balloon. It caught Alice’s eye as she hurried through the park.  The bright sunshine gleamed on the pearly blue rubber, stretched thin against the thunder purple sky. Alice smiled. It was amazing that everyone’s kids demanded total immersion games, but they still liked balloons. Outlined in summer storm-light it was significant, iconic. As she tried to work out what it meant, it burst with a loud bang. She jumped. For a second afterwards her shoulders relaxed, she breathed from the bottom of her lungs, the sunlight warmed her back. Then the little girl started crying, a cold wind whipped the clouds over the sun. Alice shivered, and strode on to the transit station. She had a holiday to earn.

#

Alice and her friend Chloe jogged along the assigned pedway, next to the river. Summer storms were months gone. It was dark at four and the embankment was strung with coloured Christmas lights and glittered with threedee stars. The ads from the sponsors hung in the air, gaudier than the real lights and festooned with virtual tinsel.

Sophie and Chloe weaved around worried-looking people lugging bagfuls of gifts.

“I don’t know how you do it,” puffed Chloe. “I’ve only got one job and I’m clinging on to my sanity by my fingernails. I hope your holiday is worth it.”

“The jobs are boring, but they’re not hard,” said Alice.  “I spend most of the time day-dreaming about the trip. Mentally packing my bags.” She swigged from her water bottle. “It’s weird though. I’ll be thinking about hiking boots and a tent and suddenly find that my brain is throwing in my grandmother’s photos, my dad’s tools and that odd little toy my great aunts knitted for me.”

“Stripy Jim? I thought you loved that toy.”

“I do.”

They collapsed gratefully on the bench that marked the end of their run.

“You’ve never been that far away before, have you?” asked Chloe. “Maybe you’re a bit nervous.”

Alice laughed. “Yes, it’s like I think someone’s going to steal my favourite stuff while I’m gone. I’m not even sure why I want to go. I just know I have to.”

“Hey, everybody needs a bit of adventure. The only holiday I’m going to get is three days over Christmas. And you know what that’ll be like.”

Alice, relaxed and weary, sipped her water and watched the festoons of lights. They hung against the winter sky like a coded message, written in red, yellow, green, white, blue. Behind them the rising trail of a ship slashed across the sky. A pop burst on the cold air as a light winked out. Alice and Chloe jumped. With a firecracker series of pops, every blue light in the string exploded.

“What the hell?” said Chloe.

“Must be something wrong with the blue ones,” said Alice. “Power rating too low or something. Let’s go back. I’ve got wine in the house. Fancy a drink?”

#

Alice settled into her seat on the ship. Her main luggage had been stowed. At the last moment, she’d thrown one photo album and her dad’s knife into her suitcase. She’d also tucked Stripy Jim into her handbag with her ID and entpod. She’d booked a window seat. Six months of three jobs, she made damned sure she was in the right place to get a good view. The noise at takeoff battered at her eadrums, the acceleration shoved her back into her chair. The businessman in the next seat flicked through the inflight ezine on his screen in a bored way, and then took out his comp and started working on a spreadsheet. Alice turned to look out the window. It was all worth it. As the deep blue of the sky zoned into star-studded black, the ship turned towards the gate and Alice got a perfect view of the Earth. A bright blue ball in the dark, pumped up and filled to bursting.

This story will be read at the Liars' League event on Tuesday May 12th.

I really have no idea where this came from except a bout of insomnia and a slight temperature!

The Swamp Witch (987 Words)

They call it the swamp-witch.  A tree half sunk in water.  Moss drapes it like soft green hair; one branch, towards the uppermost end, supports its weight, as though the witch leans on one arm. 

The story is that she crawled that way, dragging herself by her arms, her legs being broken. Another branch reaches out, pleading; there’s a hollow, softly cupped like a palm; just the right size for a baby’s head to rest in. 

She’s begging for her daughter, that’s the story; begging for her child to be buried with her.  A daughter they claimed she’d killed with witchcraft, along with a dozen other children who died within weeks of each other in one foul, steaming summer.

It was probably a fever; or a dozen different fevers.  These swamps were riddled with sickness and superstition, back in the bad old days.  Now the tourist boats cut clean paths through the dense brown water; moss tries to cling to their hulls and falls back, helpless, to disappear under the churning blades.  The guides grin and shrug, telling stories about the past and its follies.  Credulous people who believed in the power of herbs picked at the right phase of the moon, words spoken at the right time, dances with the spirit.  These are modern times and no-one believes such things any more.

Well, perhaps a few.  Among the sightseers are the…other tourists.  They are a slight embarrassment, but they spend, and so cannot be ignored.  They are the ones who are looking for something long swept away from their clean modern world, a world that allows for no alluring cobwebby corners.  They dress in black in the thick heat, and come here seeking mystery.

The girl with the moon-pale skin and hair dusty charcoal like a corpse’s, clings to the boat’s rail as far as she can get from her parents.  She finds them vulgar, embarrassing, and incapable of understanding her; which is the privilege of all teenage children.  Unfortunately, in their particular case, her judgement is absolutely accurate.  She watches the swamp-witch out of sight and wonders what it must be like, to grieve, to be tortured, to love a child so much.  Had the mother really been a witch, capable of vengeance but refraining from it as proper witches are supposed to do?  Or had she just been an outsider, scapegoated for the town’s miseries, because she was somehow different?

Had the baby had time to know she was loved?  Had her little drifting soul wailed as they took her body from her suffering mother?

It doesn’t matter if the story is true or not.  The girl’s mind seizes on it with a passion she will, in life, apply to many things, some worthy, some not.

Her parents whinge and mutter about the heat, the mosquitoes, the food.  They drink too much and collapse bloatedly into bed.  The girl sneaks out to relish the moonlight, the song of strange insects, the creak of frogs, the moss swaying like ghostly dancers in the midnight breeze.  Far away, thunder crackles. 

She walks into the woods, with a laser-bright torch she wishes were a smoking lantern.  It is hardly dangerous; everyone is very aware of the need for tourist dollars, and few would jeopardise them by attacking the daughter of wealthy, if irritating, tourists.  The only real danger is from the alligators, which refuse to join the modern world, and will eat anyone. 

She wanders towards the river, upstream of the bend where the swamp-witch endlessly reaches out.

To her delight, she discovers a graveyard in a clearing.  It has not been signposted; graveyards are unpopular, and this one is insufficiently quaint.  It has no crypts or mausoleums or evidence of witchcraft.  Many of its plain markers tilt, sinking into the wet ground.

She wanders among the stones, brushing them with the tips of her fingers, whispering fragments of poetry, spells, any words that seem to fit this place and its simple mysteries.  The moonlight disappears, the thunder rolls closer, and a great blue-white tree of lightning stabs down, lighting up her entranced face.  Then the rain, great fat warm drumming drops.  She begins to dance, holding up her thin white arms, laughing, her feet in their black buckled boots churning the soft earth. 

Then her boot goes deep, suddenly, cold mud sliding in over the top.  She flounders off balance, almost falls, realises that she has disturbed something, perhaps a grave. 

She is not frightened, only guilty.  She pulls herself free, looks for a stone, or a cross, to set upright.  But there is nothing.  If the grave was ever marked, it is no longer.

She bows, gravely, apologises aloud to anyone she may have disturbed.  The rain drums down; nobody answers, but she feels comforted.  Wet hair flat to her head, she makes her way back to the hotel, falls asleep still, in her mind, dancing to the beat of the rain among the forgiving dead. 

She wheedles money from her hungover parents and takes the boat trip one last time.  The river is swollen fat and excited with rain.  When they get there, only the nub of her green-draped head, the forward reaching arm are out of the water.  The guide runs through the story, but as they get closer, he falters to a stop. 

Something is caught in the branch.  Even as the people on the boat begin to murmur with shock and disgust, the girl smiles with clean delight at the sight of the tiny skull that rests, fitting perfectly, in the wooden palm.

She knows someone will move it within a day, sweep it away.  It’s too much of a mystery, too disturbing.  

And even though there is a logical explanation of flooding and graveyards and loosened earth, it works so perfectly as a mystery, that it works anyway.  The reality cannot remove the wonder.  Not now, and not ever again. 

This one came from quite a few places: the Liars' League April event, a random phrase from the We Feel Fine program, and some doodling about with word associations.  Put 'em all together and I'm back in the Weird West, or home on the strange.

Lonestar on the Bridge (973 words)

“You  got nothing to say about this, Lonestar?” asks Finnegan.

I shrug. What’s the point? There’s nothing you can say when you’ve been as thoroughly set up as I have. Serves me right, I s’pose. I breezed into River Bend two years ago looking for a hook to hang my heart on. I gave it away to the first man who smiled at me, Ed Hutchins. Big mistake. Now here I am, shuffling my feet in the dust in the main square, with all the townsfolk sweating in the sun and waiting for my sentence.

“Damned Shifty!” shouts the schoolmarm at the back. “Run her out of our town.”

“Send her out the hard way,” says Lennie. I heard his grandfather is from the Red Rock Clan, but he can’t shift. Not many of our people can. 

A chant starts up. “Bridge! Bridge! Bridge!”

“Last chance,” Finnegan says. I’ve watched his hawkish face over a poker table many a time. He’s good at being unreadable, but I know he wants to hear me say I didn’t do it. A man’s dead. I didn’t kill him, but I stole the key to his strongbox and I gave it to Ed and it all went wrong from there. I shake my head.

“All right then,” Finnegan announces to the crowd.  “No confession and no defence. She walks the bridge.” He sighs. “Lennie, leave the pitchfork.”

“There could be griffins up there,” says Lennie. Fat lot of good a pitchfork would do him. He’s going to jab me with it if he gets a chance.

They force a potion down my throat, to stop me shifting for at least a day. Then Finnegan marches me up the steep steps in the bluff behind the town. It’s a long, hot climb and only the most determined gawkers and Lennie and the other bridge guards are still with us by the time we get to the top. It’s cooler up here, tendrils of mist drift about.

The bridge doesn’t look so bad. It’s rope, of course, but the boards are in good repair, and there’s no wind to swing it. The other side is lost in the haze.

Finnegan squeezes my shoulder. “If you get across, you can come back the long way round,” he says.

“Don’t try turning back,” says Lennie. “We’ll be waiting.”

Sure enough, he pokes me in the ribs with the pitchfork, and I step onto the bridge. It sways a little. I hang on to the ropes and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.

Nobody knows what’s on the bridge. Hardly anyone comes back, and if they do they won’t say a thing about it. I heard some idiot talking about a troll. I met a few in my wanderings, most of ‘em just want to be left alone. There’s a great yawning drop below the bridge, not a sheltered damp place for a troll to squat.
It’s kind of peaceful up here; my whole body takes a deep breath and stretches. I’ve been in River Bend too long.

The fog is thicker now. When I glance back, I can’t see the start but I can hear Lennie and his crew laughing.

Finnegan’s done the best he can for me. The people look to him to keep the peace and the evidence pointed to me. They all knew I was part Clan; I can’t change my black hair, and I didn’t change the name my mother gave me. But I didn’t declare myself a Shifty and I got found out. They’re afraid of us. I’m lucky not to be choking at the end of a rope.

A distant screech makes me look up, but I can’t see anything in the fog. I walk on.

I bet there’s others in town; it’s a big place. The straight folks still believe a lot of plain wrong things about us. They think we can shift into any shape we like. They’re getting us mixed up with old Clan stories about lurking beasts that turn into a tent or or a patch of fog or a pond and wait for food to walk right in.

The bridge quivers like a live thing under my feet. The ropes thrum in a way that has nothing to do with me. I pick up my pace, half-jogging.

Us Shifties just get one form, and it’s handed out by tricky luck. Everyone wants a bear, or a wolf or an eagle. Me, the terror of River Bend, I can do a mouse.

The bridge really starts to move now, swinging from side to side. I wrap my arms in the ropes and hang on tight. It gets faster, and I’m afraid it will twist right over. If I could shift I might survive the fall, but the potion won’t wear off for a while. A raucous screech echoes behind me and the movement stops.

When I’ve stopped shaking, I unwrap myself from the ropes and move on. I can see blackness in the fog, the bulk of rock at the other side, and I run as fast as I can, hands skimming the ropes, planks shaking under my feet. Overhead, I hear the whumpf sound of great wings beating. And as I see firm ground in sight, there is also a golden bulk of fur and feathers, a sharp beak curved like a scythe, bright orange saucer eyes.

I am very, very still. The griffin opens its beak.

“That was Lennie shaking the bridge,” it says in Finnegan’s voice. “I ran him off.”

“Uh. Th - thanks.”

“If I thought you did it, I’d’ve let you drop.”

He shifts back to his rangy human form, and holds out a hand to help me off the bridge. He smiles, sudden and sunny. It’s a much better smile than Ed’s.

This is what happens when you catch a bit of a programme about tomb-robbing when you're doing the washing-up...

A Place of Rest (943 words)

Hengst eased himself through the gap, into the familiar scents of stone and earth.  He was cautiously triumphant.  He had not been at all sure this tomb actually existed, and worried that someone would have got here before him.  But although there had been some disturbance around the entrance, it was old and minor; it might have been animals. 

He lit his torch, looking for curses.  A good curse meant there was something here worth taking.  The wall-paintings alone were some of the best he’d seen.  He paused to admire a pair of blonde lovelies bearing platters of fruit no less perfect than their breasts. 

Ah, and there was the curse. May death enfold him who would disturb this resting place.

Somewhat unimaginative, that.  Hengst went deeper, experience allowing him to ignore the dead-ends and false doorways. 

When he finally broke into the central room, he stood gawping, the torch drooping in his hand.  The space was dominated by a great bed supported on two carved lynxes inlaid with shell.  All around, on tables of fine wood and coloured marble, stood boxes of cedarwood thick with gold, their seals promising spices and jewels.  A throne gleaming with agates and silver.  Lamps of pierced brasswork fine as lace.  Statues of cattle and soldiers and servants in finest work.

Hengst’s heartbeat sounded loud in his ears as he wandered around the room, the torchlight dancing on gilding and jewelled caskets. So much to get out!  He’d left his horse tied some distance away.  He needed a cart.  How would he stop anyone else suspecting what he’d found? 

Should he take one or two of the smaller pieces now?  A jar of rare spice; no.  Too big.  And too obviously a tomb-piece if he were seen with it.  The tiny perfect statue of a general, glaring furiously above his beard?  Hengst picked it up.  Where it had been the procession looked gappy, like a mouth missing a tooth.  He put it back.

It was only when his stomach groaned that he realised he was ravenous.  At some point he’d lit several of the lamps; the oil was still good, and they cast a warm rich light scented with herbs.

Hengst reluctantly blew them out and made his way back towards the entrance. 

When he peered through, white light hurt his eyes.  Daylight!  Not only daylight but a bright midday, cloudshadows scurrying like the ghosts of sheep across the green hillside.  How long had he been there?

He hesitated.  If he went out now, he would be as obvious as a fly in a mug of beer.  All it would take would be one passer-by. 

He had some water and a little food.  He could wait.

Hengst wandered among the offerings.  Everything here was so perfect.  He lived simply himself, not wanting to draw attention; this dark torch-gilded richness was like nothing he had seen in a long career of plunder. He realised he was tired.  Not as young as he was.  He looked at the bed, and thought, with a little surge of resentment, Why not?  Never in my life have I lain on such a bed, and if the priests are right, in the afterlife I’ll not either; more likely have my liver torn out by wolves or some such thing.  Personally, he thought at death you got a few feet of earth to lie in, no more.  Wolves probably did eat your liver, but you would neither know nor care.

Still, he felt a little daring, as he lit two of the lamps, blew out the torch, and laid himself down.  He had never had such a mattress; it was like lying on water, or a cloud. He drew the thick fur cover over him.

Two life-size statues of women leaned above the bed, their arms outstretched, their breasts gleaming.  He imagined how it would be to be served by such women.

Some time later Hengst woke, and went up to the hidden doorway.  The bright afternoon had turned to a windy, rainspattered night.  He couldn’t take anything out in this; exposed to the weather, things might be ruined.  The thought of the beautiful carvings stained and cracked, the spices losing their scent, was painful.  He withdrew again, to walk, murmuring, among the treasures, his fingers tracing curves of stone and silver. 

The next day it had stopped raining, but Hengst saw a distant figure walking along the hillside.  Did the figure look his way, searching, greedy?   He scowled and withdrew.

***

A carpenter’s apprentice was trudging along the lane when he saw a good, broad-backed gelding, tied to a tree.  It had eaten the grass bare in a circle around it, and started on the bark of the tree.  Its reins were worn almost to snapping where it had tugged at them, trying to free itself.  The boy called out a few times, for duty; but it was obvious the horse had been there several days.  He was good with horses; it came easily to his hand when he untied it.   

The boy mounted, and tapped the horse with his heel.  His master had told him he’d found a horse wandering this lane before, some years ago, and had sold it for a good price.  He’d be pleased, and maybe show the boy how to carve the wonderful lilies he was making for the old King’s burial-casket.

They rode off into the darkening afternoon.  Above them, on the hill, a patter of earth loosened by recent rain fell into darkness, and a stone tumbled after it.  In the fast-growing summer, soon there would be no sign there had been an entrance there at all. 

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.