Tales From Beyond The Town: Pocket Editions #16-#21

I had six different colours of card. So I made six different tiny tales.

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Pocket Tales #16: Tales From The Sea

Carousel

The circus was washed away in a storm. Now the horses only turn with the tides.

Clowns

But at least the clowns no longer laugh.

Vents

Everyone liked the word ‘vents’

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Pocket Tales #17: Tales From The Beach

Instead of buckets, paper bags, But the spades were still plastic.

View From Above

You cannot escape the watchful drones

Beak

The gulls were not amused

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Pocket Tales #18: Tales From The Fields

In the long grass
the cat
dreams it was a lion

Barrows

Waves of earth
two thousand years old
full of bones older still

Dandelions

They float
They are lighter than air

Slow Worm

It snakes, despite itself

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Pocket Tales #19: Tales From The Woods

From above everything looks green.
But when you’re in it, it’s brown in every direction

The Walls In The Woods

Everyone loves the walls in the woods
Old boundaries between forgotten kingdoms
Identities and purposes no longer known

Bole

A beautiful word for a beautiful a thing

Above/Below

There is no difference
between the above and below

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Pocket Tales #20: Tales From Mars

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Pocket Tales #21: Tales From The Candle Flame

Look into me
and think
and wish
and wait

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Notes:

1. Tales From The Sea was written between the 16th and the 19th of June, 2023 (mainly due to drawing all those jellyfish)
2. Tales From The Beach was written on August 3rd, 2023
3. And the other four were written on September 4th, 2023
4. Previous Pocket Tales can be found here: #1-#4, #5-#9, #10-#12, #13-#15
5. If you want to chart their steady decline

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Tale #68: The Drunken Sailor

There was a sailor who, while drunk, went out to sea, where he lost control of his boat, and he lost control of his bowels.

But the truth of his story was that claiming drunkenness was merely an attempt to lessen his shame.

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Notes:

1. Written on June 26th, 2018

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Tale #66: The Silver Ship

Beyond the ocean, past the known, out upon the unseen sparkling seas, there travels a silver ship, its sails spun from golden thread, its oars carved from bone.

It is crewed by the people it rescues from the depths – the lost and the lonely; the imprisoned and the condemned; the innocent proclaimed guilty by the guilty; the free enslaved by those that talk, always, of freedom; the dead that should not have died; the living that could not save them, no matter how much they tried.

And it seeks out others, too, across the waters of the world. These people it does not save. It leaves them to drown, their ships sunk, their crimes finally punished, their names forever now forgotten.

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Notes:

1. Written on August 8th, 2018

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Tale #65: And in their ships they sailed out across the sea

In seven ships they sailed out across the sea to search for new lands to conquer.

The King’s ship sank first, struck by lightning in a storm, followed soon by the Lords’ vessel, and the Ladies’ too, both of which were lost to the waves of the tempest that raged on and on through the night.

After that a silence that stretched out across the days.

The soldiers’ ship went next; in the calm after the storm, with no wind to move their sails, mutiny smouldered, civil war took, and up it all went in a blaze of self-destruction, death and despair.

The priests’s ship crashed upon hidden rocks. The merchants’ vessel was waylaid by pirates.

All that was left of the fleet now was the ship of slaves, of servants, of maids.

They came soon to land and settled quietly there. In the years that followed, it was agreed that nothing of value had been lost upon the journey, and much indeed had been gained.

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Notes:

1. Written in August 2016
2. And re-written many times since

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