Tales From The Town #48: The Door In The Wall, or The Worth Of Dreams

The first time Yulia saw the door was on her walk to work one morning, in the middle of the old Roman wall that ran through the centre of the town. It had never been there before. But there it was, locked and closed and as solid and real as the wall itself. She couldn’t stop thinking about it all day, this out of place door in the middle of that wall. When she came home that evening, it was gone.

The second time she saw it, it was down near the abandoned pub, in the wall circling the beer garden. A different wall, but the same door. It was unmistakeable. She was on the bus this time, and caught only a glimpse of it, but she was sure it was open now, not fully, but slightly ajar at least, a shaft of light shining though the gap and illuminating the pavement with an ethereal glow.

Then the bus rattled on towards its destination, and all Yulia was left with was the memory of it on her retinas, a patch of shimmering blue superimposed over the dismal and the dull of the town in winter.

The third time the door was on the other side of the street, opposite the shop, in the ruins of the old gallery, directly in her line of sight for the whole of the day. It was wide open, and Yulia could see through to what lay beyond. And what she was a world of wonders, a shifting infinity of possibilities, each one more enticing than the last, more beautiful than any heaven.

Only the queue of her customers, which stretched twice round the shop and back down the street, kept her from getting up from her chair and crossing the street and stepping through that door and never coming back.

Yulia knew it was all a dream, but that hardly mattered. She’d seen it now. Seen through and beyond to something else, something other than this. All she had to do was was wait. Wait for the door to return, for her to take her chance. There were other worlds than these.

__________

Notes:

1. Written between June 7th and June 14th, 2021
2. The title is taken from an HG Wells short story
3. And the last line is taken from The Gunslinger by Stephen King
4. But the bits in between are my own

Aaaaaaaargh! (a game)

This was made using the Pulp game editor for Playdate. You can download the game below, to play either through the Pulp app emulator or the playdate itself (maybe – I have no idea when they’re released or how they work).

Download: aaaargh (zip file)

To install it you’ll need to extract and import either the json file (which I think is the source code) into the pulp app, or load the .pdx folder onto your playdate (if anyone actually has a Playdate). You might need to make an account first to use the Pulp editor, and there’s import buttons on the main page that should hopefully work with these files.

__________

Notes:

1. Made in March 2022
2. The sounds/soundtrack are terrible, for which I apologise
3. But they were the best I could do.
4. It is supposed to be intentionally irritating.
5. But the sound on this video is somehow broken even more.
6. I have no idea how to capture system sounds using quicktime, so had to record the audio through the internal microphone, the noise cancelling algorithms of which seem to have eaten half of the static and most of the beeps.
7. Sorry about that.

Tales From The Town #47: Winter

A Winter’s Day

“It’s cold,” said Tina.

“It’s really cold,” said Claire.

“It’s too cold,” said Ethel.

Daniel’s teeth chattered and his face went blue.

“I told you all it wasn’t the weather for ice cream,” Agnes said with a sigh, as she paid the ice cream van driver and ushered the children back inside.

A Winter’s Night

Sixteen hours of dark, and all of it silent. Softly floating snow making rainbows as it falls, the colour of moonlight, the colour of streetlights, the colour of headlights, the colour of fairy lights put up for Christmas and never taken down.

Three months later and they still don’t look out of place. Winter deadens time like snow swallows sound. Purgatorial beauty.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on June 11th, 2021
2. A sequel to Tales From The Town #15: Summer

Tales From The Town #45: A Cave Full Of Slowly Melting Snow

The sea outside was no longer frozen, but the cave itself was filled with slowly melting snow.

“I’ve got a houseplant now,” Tina said. “I feed it strawberries and apricots and then it sings itself to sleep.”

“I saw seven thousand seven hundred and sixty eight spiders,” Ethel said. “All at once!”

“Well, I died and went to hell!” Claire said gleefully. “For a whole afternoon.”

“I chopped the head off a dragon!” Daniel said.

“You did not!” Claire said.

“I did,” Daniel insisted. “And then I chopped it off again when it grew back, and then I ran away.”

“I don’t believe that at all,” Claire said. “If you’d done all that we’d know. There’d be stories about it and everything. You’re just making things up to impress Dad.”

“I’m not,” Daniel said. “It really happened. But no one saw.”

It had been a long time since Antoine had had any guests. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to say. Eventually he noticed the children had all gone quiet. In the silence of the moment the only sounds were the crackles of the fire and the crabs clacking their claws in anger at the snow. Breath and smoke mingled and rose up into the dark.

“Winter lasts forever and then all of a sudden it’s gone,” he said eventually. His children looked at him in a way which made him doubt whether he was even there.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on June 8th, 2021