Tumescent Moon

Friday October 31st As Christopher manoeuvred his wheelchair across the bare pine boards of the dining room floor he was startled by a sudden jerk as the right wheel passed over some obstruction, which emitted a loud, protesting squeal. He looked down at the tiny furry object. Another bloody bear! he thought and leaned over to pick it up from the floor. It had once had a pink plastic face, but the passage of the wheelchair had dented and cracked it so that it now resembled an aged and dim-witted Pekinese. He squeezed its belly and it bleated loudly. He didn’t recognise this particular bear but his wife had had so many hundreds of them that it wasn’t really surprising. He made a grimace of disgust. Thought I’d got rid of them all, but they keep turning up! He flung the bear into the open fireplace and watched the flames from the log fire dance over the nylon fur for a moment until he was satisfied that it was well alight. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his progress towards the te

Low, but insistent, the sound insinuated itself into his ears and pulled him slowly from his bleak dreams. He muttered to himself, winding deeper into the blankets and drawing them over his head. Tappety-tappety-tap! Knuckles rapped against the door of his mind. A fragment of some long-ago-known but now forgotten jazz melody floated over the top of the odd, disjointed rhythm and then was gone. Tappety-tappety-tap! TAP! The coarse blanket scratched the skin of his face. A thick string of saliva wound its way down his chin and pooled in the notch at the base of his neck. He sneezed as stray fibres from the bedclothes tickled the back of his nose. TAP! Some deep part of him panicked briefly at the suffocating closeness and his arms flailed and flung the blanket away from his face. His fingers kneaded his eyes, rubbing the night-grit from their corners. TAP! TAP! TAP! "What?" The sound of his voice startled him, sounding thick and menacing in the gloom of his be

From the shadows under the trees that grew behind the garden wall at the back of the house - his house - he watched as the last light went out. He coughed and spat some bloody slime from his broken lung: he knew it would be soon. The after-midnight moon brushed with silver the grey fur of a cat stepping daintily along the top of the wall, the light making lamps of its eyes. The cat turned once, twice in its tracks and leapt from light into shade, pursuing some small scurrying animal into the deep darkness beneath the trees. He watched it go, his imagination making them brothers of the hunt. As he waited for the hush of the night and the warm, soothing waves of moist summer air to sink the world into sleep he allowed the memories to fill him once more. The cold fire sang within him, tracing its icy way from the pit of his stomach through muscle and nerve until it filled his head with a pure and cleansing rage that fused his intellect and will into a hard, brilliant crystal of hatred.

Charlie whistled. Incessantly. Charlie had whistled ever since, at the age of five or six, his father had taught him the secret. His was a sunny disposition which no misfortune could ever darken; in him there were no hidden shadows, no bitter memories, no nooks and crannies where sorrow could take residence and grow. He was shallow, but he was happy. And he whistled. His unremitting cheerfulness had won him many friends: everybody loved Charlie, although most people could only take him in small doses. The only person, apart from his parents, who had ever endured more than a day or two of his company - his former wife - had finally exploded one morning and in the grip of a menstrual rage had bellowed at him "Why the fuck can’t you be miserable like everyone else?" before hurling a particularly hideous vase at him (Charlie had bought it as an anniversary present for her the previous year - he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a flatworm) and stomping out, never to return.

The Princess walked through the trees. From a long way behind her she could hear the voices of the ladies of her retinue as they chattered and giggled like schoolgirls. She wondered how long it would be before they noticed that she had gone. There would undoubtedly be hell to pay if her father ever discovered that she’d disobeyed his orders to be with her ladies-in-waiting at all times - and she shuddered as the thought of the flogging block and the birch twigs fleetingly crossed her mind - but she was desperate to escape her boredom. Her life was suffocating her: she felt that all the luxuries in the world were inadequate compensation for the loss of her freedom to do as she pleased, to escape the routines of ritual and duty that defined every moment of her waking day, to have adventures, to be alone. The tinkling of a forest stream drew her onwards through the blossom-perfumed gloom to where a break in the trees allowed a bright shaft of sunlight to stand in the summer air like the

"Of course it’s unfinished", he said, flapping with a muscular hand and brawny forearm towards the squat, square outline of the stone figure which stood in the approximate centre of his lawn, "but with Johnny’s stuff who could ever tell?" His chuckle died half-formed, to be replaced by an inward sigh at the same look of frosty disapproval which had seized the pretty face in front of him at his every attempt thus far at either humour or flirtatiousness. "God," he thought to himself, "this woman is a pain!" He’d forgotten all about her visit. He’d been drowsing in a garden chair, eyes half-closed under the shadow of a straw hat in the blazing hot July mid-morning, when the mobile phone resting next to the jug of iced Planter's Punch on the table at his side had sheared through his reverie. He’d picked it up, and before he’d even managed to utter a sleepy "hello" a young but clipped feminine voice had announced "Laurence Mayna

Norris hovered uncertainly at the edge of the dance floor. He wanted very badly to lose himself in that swaying, tangled forest of arms and legs, but every time he tried to move into a gap it magically closed up and he was once more barred from entering the holy circle. The dancers seemed to be possessed by a single consciousness one of whose imperatives was to exclude him at all costs. After a while he gave up and looked for a vacant seat somewhere. The song wasn’t one of his favourites anyway - some gibberish about a motherfucker in a motorcade which, judging by the frequency with which it was played, was by somebody really well-known and important but not, of course, recognised by him . In any case, although he’d practised for hours in front of his bedroom mirror he had the uncomfortable feeling that when he danced he resembled nothing quite so much as a praying mantis in the grips of a terminal epileptic seizure - his arms and legs seemed to move to separate rhythms of their own,

Nothing. No dreams at all, just darkness and silence. *** It was, Todd guessed, about 11 a.m. His head pained him slightly, but otherwise he felt better than he had any right to do, given the amount he'd had to drink. A deep sense of satisfaction filled him at the thought of being able to slam an entire album's worth of material onto Big Al's desk on Friday morning: that'd show the sneering fucker that he hadn't lost it! So good was he feeling, in fact, that he practically vaulted out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. As he was shaving he noticed that the bourbon-induced puffiness of recent months had entirely left his face. In fact, he looked a good ten years younger than he had on the day of his arrival. Even the slow retreat of hair from his temples seemed to have reversed itself. "Jesus!" he crooned at his reflection, "You're one beautiful fucker! Maybe I ought to do this country-living thing more often." No breakfast thi

She was delicately pretty, with long lustrous dark hair, and she stood naked before the old four-footed bathtub. Around her all the sorrows of the world were gathered and she knelt amidst them, clasping her hands together in prayer. "I'm too weak, Lord," she whispered, "Too weak for him." "Forgive me, Lord," she whispered, "Forgive me for loving him." She lowered herself into the steaming water, and reached out... From her wrists, from the deep furrows where the knife had been, her blood formed pink clouds in the water. Above her, on the bathroom window-ledge, a fat black cat raised a paw to its mouth and licked. *** The grey of the previous few days had finally given way to late autumnal sunlight by the time Todd awoke. His head throbbed but, apart from the slightly nervy feeling which seemed to be constantly with him now, he felt good and - as he told himself - the cellar held plenty of headache-medicine. "Strange dream