“What’s that one?” Selene asked, pointing at the brightest object in the night sky.
“Which one?” Patricia said.
“The one I’m pointing at! The brightest one.”
“Oh, that’s the moon.”
“It is not the moon,” Selene said. “I think I know which one the moon is. I lived there long enough.”
“It is the moon,” Patricia said. “It’s definitely the moon.”
“If that’s the moon,” Selene said. “Then what’s that?”
Patricia screamed.
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Notes:
1. Written on May 5th, 2021
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Agnes was in the kitchen when she heard the music in the distance. A chill ran down her spine. She closed the laptop and waited for what was sure to come.
Footsteps on the stairs. Doors flung wide. A swarming crowd of desperate faces, raised from some winter-long hibernation.
“Mum! Mum! Can we have some money?”
“For ice creams!”
“From the ice cream van!”
“We’ve got a freezer full of ice creams,” Agnes said. “Can’t you have one of those?”
“But they’re not the same!”
“They’re exactly the same,” Agnes said.
“They’re not.”
“The ice cream van has more.”
“And they’re bigger!”
“And colder!”
“They are not colder.”
“They are!”
“And they might have some new ones!”
“Last year they had some we’d never seen before!”
“They were horrible!”
“Well, our ones aren’t horrible,” Agnes said. “I got the ones we all like.”
“But we’ve been good, Mum!”
“Really good!”
“You said if we’d been good we could have an ice cream!”
“From the ice cream van!”
“I don’t remember saying that at all.”
“Well, you did!”
“You definitely did!”
“Okay, okay,” Agnes said, fishing out some small change from the pockets of her jeans and dropping it into their grasping mitts. “But don’t just buy the ones we’ve got in the freezer!”
Footsteps in the hall. Doors slamming shut behind them. Cries of excitement fading out down the street.
Agnes sat down at the table and sighed. Of all the things in all the worlds, the continued existence of ice cream vans was the thing she understood the least.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on May 4th, 2021
2. With thanks to Arab Strap for the title.
Daytime
Yulia didn’t count how many dreams she had in any particularly day. If she did, she would have discovered that today, for example, between the hours of 8am and 5.30pm, not including an hour for lunch (1pm-2pm) and two breaks for tea (10.15am-10.30am; 3.45pm-4pm), she had 23 distinct dreams, plus 3 subdreams, one of which also contained a single subsubdream, for a total of 27 dreams, occurring at a rate 3.375 dreams per hour.
That was the speed at which the day passed her by.
Nightshift
Yulia’s nights were somewhat slowe. Yesterday evening, for example, between the hours of 11pm and 6.30am, not including two toilet breaks (2.13am-2.17am; 3.49am-3.57am), an hour of acute anxiety (11.01pm-12.01am) and a short period of moongazing (12.02am-12.45am), she had only one dream, albeit experienced across three distinct (but linked) periods of sleep (12.46am-2.12am; 2.18am-3.49am; 3.58am-6.30am), at a rate of 0.18237082066 or 0.547112462 dreams per hour, depending on how exactly you wanted to count them.
In this dream, she dreamt of the shop, and everyone in it, in a detail so exact and complete it could have come direct from the shop’s CCTV. In some ways, the only difference between Yulia’s nights and days was that at night she no longer had her dreams to distract her from the monotony of the day.
___________
Notes:
1. Written between the 1st and the 4th of May, 2021
__________
“Mum! Mum! We found a new room!”
“Another one?”
“Yep!”
“It’s the second one this week!”
“This room was full of dolls!”
“They’re so creepy.”
“They all look at you!”
“And keep looking at you!”
“The whole time you’re in there!”
“And then you can hear them laughing when you leave!”
“One of them winked at me,” Daniel said. “And then her eye fell out!”
“Well, I always wondered where they all came from,” Agnes said. “You must have found their nest.”
“It’s behind Ethel’s bedroom!”
“You have to crawl through a little tunnel to get there.”
“There’s a door in my cupboard,” Ethel said. “That’s how you get in to see them.”
“And how they get out to see us!”
“There never used to be a door there,” Agnes said. “I’d have noticed.”
“We know, Mum.”
“We already told you this is a new room.”
“Well, don’t tell Oya and Anna,” Agnes said. “They might not want to know they live in a house that grows. It might frighten them.”
“Anna’s not scared of anything!” Ethel said.
“Well, Oya might be,” said Agnes. “You did say these dolls were frightening, remember?”
“We did not,” said Claire. “We said they were creepy!”
“They make you all shivery just to look at them,” Tina said.
“But they’re not scary at all,” Ethel said.
“Not even when they wink at you!” Daniel told his mother.
“And their eyes fall out!”
“And they start bleeding doll’s brains out of their eyeholes!”
“I really don’t think you should tell Oya,” Agnes said firmly.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on May 4th, 2021
__________
These are little Tales From The Town booklets that you can keep in your pocket, all made from a single sheet of paper folded up inexpertly into a little book, with a cover and three tales on the first three pages, and then four more inside when you unfold it. (There’s nothing on the reverse of the sheet because the ink from the pens bled through the paper)
They are entirely pointless really but then entirely pointless things are the best sorts of things.
Pocket Tales #1
It didn’t last long. But it would be rebuilt forever. Permanence through transience. Memories made flesh.
The cages had been empty for quite some time. As fast as anyone could fill them, others emptied them. You can’t imagine what now lives in the woods.
It was a jungle in there.
It was always the hair it got wrong. .gnorw tog ti riah eht syawla saw tI
__________
Pocket Tales #2
You could walk up its tail and slide down its neck. But no one ever did.
The longer you look the larger it looms.
It wasn’t very deep. But it was somehow irresistible.
They were having a party. They could eat anything they wanted. And they want to eat just about everything. (As long as it was triangular).
__________
Pocket Tales #3
Its sadness persisted for as long as it lived.
It was impossible to see against the sea and the sky. It liked to believe it no longer existed.
You went inside so you could come back out. No one knew why it was there.
Nothing it showed mattered any more. The less useful it was, the more beautiful it became.
__________
Pocket Tales #4
It was neither fun nor fair. We would never learn.
An abundance of life in little more than a puddle. Each day new marvels could be found.
Rusted Metal and barnacles. A strange romance, but an evocative one.
Unidentified Skeleton
Is there anything in this world better than half buried old bones?
The Top Of The Cliff
Look out to sea. Let the wind blow through your hair. Brood to your heart’s content.
The Hole
Things emerged from here more often than we liked. But to fill it in seemed unimaginable.
The Bottom Of The Cliff
The ruins of old civilisations.
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Notes:
1. Pocket Tales #1 was written on June 2nd, 2021
2. Pocket Tales #2 and #3 were written on June 3rd, 2021
3. Pocket Tales #4 was written on June 5th, 2021
4. I made these because it’s been sunny here, and I had some nieces and nephews staying, and so we made some things in the garden
5. I drew the pictures and wrote the words, but they suggested the topics for me to draw sometimes, especially in Pocket Tales #1 and #2
6. Pocket Tales #3 was an experiment with paint (which didn’t quite work, due to printer paper going all crinkly when wet)
7. Pocket Tales #4 was written all on my own because they had left by then and I missed them already
8. If you want to print some of these out yourself, you can use the images below if you want (click on them to get the full size versions)
