A bald man woke one morning to find that his beard had moved from his chin, where it usually resided, to the back of his head.
Soon, he went mad and died
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Notes:
1. Written on April 2nd, 2019
2. And another one for this list
3. It’s okay though I’ve stopped now
A noblewoman of some renown liked to stroke the animals of the court and countryside. Cats and dogs; cows and horses; sheep and goats; the King’s crows and the Queen’s swans; the noblewoman petted them all, and took great delight in doing so.
One spring, a hedgehog took up residence in the bushes of her garden. Each night, she put out food for the creature, and over the long months of summer she slowly gained its favour. One night, she sat in the garden in her nightgown, the bowl of food in her lap. The hedgehog climbed up onto her, and while it ate, she reached down, and gently, ever so gently, stroked the hedgehog’s back.
Over the coming days, many asked her to describe how it felt to stroke a hedgehog, but she could not find the words to describe the sensation, and so she stayed silent, no matter the clamour they made for her to impart her wisdom.
Before autumn turned to winter, the noblewoman went mad and died, and her knowledge was lost to the world.
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Notes:
1. Written April 1st, 2019
2. Part of my ongoing “To…” series
3. All of which utilise the same ending formulation
4. The series began with To Follow A Cat
5. And includes To Lose Your Faith, To Follow A Child, and To Ponder Infinity
6. But, confusingly, not To Be Kept Safe
There was a woman who was born in a bookshop. She dreamt in words, spoke in pictures, and always knew a liar when she saw one.
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Notes:
1. Written on June 28th, 2019
__________The house at dusk stands out black against the reddening sky, a lone monument upon the hill. The house at dawn looks much the same, yet who can tell what fresh horrors have occurred within its walls during those long hours between.
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Notes:
1. Written on November 18th, 2019
__________There once was a town that was besieged by beasts. Cats caught the fish from the lake, curling their paws beneath the waters and hooking them out with a quick swipe of their claws. Foxes ate the chickens in the hen house, biting off their heads with a single snap of their jaws. And packs of wolves… well, they would eat your own grandmother in her bed if they caught so much as a sniff of her.
So to keep themselves safe, the people of the town built a wall that stretched around the whole of the town.
In the days that followed its completion, the cats climbed over it, the foxes burrowed under it, and the wolves bit through the wires as if they were string. Only the people of the town were stopped by the wall, trapped inside and unable to escape.
“What’s wrong with the wall?” they wondered, and together set about identifying where they had gone wrong. It needs to be higher, they said. Deeper. Stronger.
Those were the faults they identified. Those were the faults they vowed to fix.
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Notes:
1. Written December 2019
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