Once upon a time there lived a king. It seems absurd but it’s true.
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Notes:
1. Written on October 14th, 2022
__________A short story or two
The New Sound
A few years after the catastrophe, they reinvented sound for the silence, so if you were rich enough you could hear again. It worked by some sort of pressure manipulation within the walls of your skull, and although I’m sure they could have come up with some elegant design for the devices the demand was so high they didn’t really bother. Subsequently it looked like you were wearing suction cups on your ears, the sort of toilet plungers they have in old cartoons that I have no idea whether really existed or not.
If I’d been in charge, I’d have made them look like seashells, iridescent surfaces flickering through visual equivalents to the simulated audio pulsations being forced through the wearer’s skull. But anything can look cool when it signifies wealth and privilege, I suppose, and everyone wanted a pair. They were this year’s hottest fad, even more popular than those hairy sweets everyone seems to like.
For Christmas I bought our kids an hour at one of the sound booths, each of them taking turns while the others stroked their desserts and stared in awe and wonder at the expressions on their siblings’ faces as the pressure undulations stimulated sections of their brain dormant since birth.
Our hour was up before I got a chance to use them. On the way home, through eyes stinging with barely suppressed tears, I tapped out “What was it like?” They replied with several thumbs up, two love hearts, and fifty seven consecutive Ed Sheeran emojis.
Now the tears flowed. They would not stop.
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Notes:
1. Written on December 12, 2022
2. Song title taken from this song that I used to love
3. And still like quite a bit
Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!A Tale of King Arthur’s Court
The King called for a feast, for it was Christmas, and so every single bird and every single beast of the country was caught and killed and brought to the kitchens of Camelot to be roasted in the marrow of its own bones. Every fruit from every tree and every root from every bush that wasn’t deadly poisonous in its own right was brewed up and fermented and distilled until it was as intoxicating as a single glance from Queen Guinevere herself. And twelve days of merriment was enjoyed by all who had earned their place around the table.
At the end of the feast, and the beginning of the new year, the Knights set forth for distant lands in search of supplies for next year’s gathering. By Merlin’s estimates there were ten feasts until they brought about the end of the world and the death of all things. Lancelot claimed he could get that down to eight if he tried, and everyone laughed and clapped him on the back, as he drank one last pitcher of sweetly rotting mead before climbing up onto his horse and setting out into the mist of the early morn.
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Notes:
1. Written on the 20th October, 2022
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!Oxygen Dreams
Pumped in extra thick, 40/60 mix, euphorics for a sullen crew. Out past Jupiter the hallucinations kick in, open sky visions, phantom smell of rain, insectoid hums, gravitational tugs on calcium-filled bones, nostalgic visions scraped thin off childhood media memories.
You’d think we’d be used to the dark now, used to the float. But in my dreams I still scream as I fall.
Wake up.
Fall some more.
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Notes:
1. Written on October 19th, 2022
__________Support An Accumulation Of Things
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!The Boat
We took the boat out on the river.
It wasn’t our boat. It wasn’t even our river. We had no idea idea what we were doing. It was amazing we’d ever got it started, let alone kept it going.
“Imagine owning your own boat,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“Where would you even put it?” Sam said. “You know, when you’d got where you were going.”
“Maybe they have boat parks,” I suggested. “Pay and display multi-boaties.”
“Maybe no one owns boats,” Sam suggested. “Maybe they’re all stolen!”
She spilled half a bottle of red wine down her life jacket and giggled. She didn’t care. It was stolen too. The wine and the jacket and everything else. Especially the jaunty little captain’s hat.
“Maybe they aren’t even boats!” I said deliriously. “Maybe they all just for show. ‘Oooooh look, I’ve got a boat! Aren’t I rich! Aren’t I clever!'”
“Pretend boats,” Sam said slowly, as if she was quoting something. “Are ships.”
It didn’t make any sense, but we laughed anyway. I spun the wheel or whatever it was called and made us drive around in circles, great arcs of spray splattering around us like rainbows. I fired a flare up into the sky. Part of me didn’t really believe flares existed, but here we were. They were just like in a film, but without the whooshing sound, and not as bright, because it was the middle of the day. No one fires flares off in the day in films. What’d be the point?
“We should steal a plane tomorrow,” Sam suggested, as she vomited into a bright yellow rubber boot that happened, purely by luck, to be between her feet. “Or a tank!”
But by then we were lost, a long way out to sea, sinking, unable to swim. No one ever saw us again. No one ever even knew it was us who stole the boat.
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Notes:
1. Written in the summer of 2020 sometime.
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