Screams

Screams. Screams in the ark and squeals of laughter. For days and days now, with relentless abandonment, an anarchy of celebration eddying through the town with each change of form of merriment. Christmas and New Year was never so frightful, when I was young.

One minute

10:55AM. Half drunk cups of coffee compete for prominence amongst the breakfast detritus, lying on the table. Sunlight streams in, not for the first time to engage in shadow-play again amidst this unchanged scene. A body, once ripe and bloated lies prune-like in a shroud of dust. 10:56AM. The first knock on the door in six months.

The mouse detective from Bologna Beach

Slashes of color riot in a whirlwind of dance and movement as she sashays from table to table, her dress the object of everyone’s attention – even Monsieur Michail’s, the mouse detective from Bologna Beach.

Bob the what?

The corridor was rapidly filling with flames as Bob ran at forefront of the conflagration, arms clutching the precious files to his chest while pieces of synthetic ceiling burst into black smoke and fell spraying hot, glowing plastic shrapnel all over. He fell, not for the first time, “The books!” screamed Bob the Accountant, as he woke with a start.

Pschychominer

There are places, deep hidden recesses within the mind, that even seasoned dream-searchers and psycho-miners don’t go: not out of fear and terror, but out of sheer bewilderment and inability to comprehend – yet this is where Toth had found herself; inadvertently, and with no perceivable way out.

Diarama

At two AM in the morning, all was silent until that shot rang out. Like all such great shots that change the history of a people, a nation, a world, this was no exception. Several hours later, they found him lying in his own blood, in the small lane off Main Street… the Taxidermist was dead.

King Billy Bites Back

Dark clouds roamed overhead as night settled down like a lid on a steaming pot, while the people of the village, agitated back and forth from house to inn to shop, simmering with the latest news – King Billy of Ballarat was still alive!

As luck would have it

It was the day after the day after that day when my world was “shot to shit”. Three days later! Two if you don’t count, “that day,” and to think when I’d woken up then, that I thought it was going to be, “my lucky day”.

Rising Fortunes

It is with known acceptance that most people do not handle change well, be it change via success or change via adversity. The upheaval and distress of adverse change is well documented, even down to the vagaries of change caused by minor misfortunes. Here we will not focus on such change, but on the change that comes as a result of New Money becoming Old Money, and collapsing back into New.

Canto-nized

“Forever Autumn!” that’s what it said, scrawled across the lower right corner of a sun-faded portrait, of the most alluring Canto-Pop Queen ever to grace the airways between Hong Kong and the Zhuhai Sez. Few realized that she was nothing more than an A.I. construct. Even fewer knew that she was no longer even that, or that she was now well and truly, dead!

Sunrise

Hanging heavy in the morning light, the sun like a dull, red ball, as big as a lunar cheese wheel, slowly rose into the sky. Somewhere in this shimmering mass of air, between Hill’s End and “The Morning’s Glory” at Trentha Falls, a bunyip stirred.

Gumshoe

The promise of rain, lying in fat droplets on a teak-stained boardwalk, harassed by a fickle wind, waiting like some shadow-shrouded sidewalk-swallow for an opportunity to approach. I pulled up the collar of my trench coat, against the moist kisses of the wind, and walked on.

Not the brightest kid

Clouds raged! Across the sky, encroached bolts and sheets of lightning. Each thunderclap, announcing post-haste that War, had broken out! Between Air and Water, using Fire and Dust as media to wage their conflict. George stood under the only tree on the high, barren, promontory and watched: he wasn’t the brightest kid on the block – he liked to talk of dragons. In years to follow, some would call him a Saint.

Three days out

Three days out on a long, straight road, seemingly going to nowhere, we found it, a low, long eroded and slowly sinking ridge, once previously known only to Lockhart – fortune and glory…and gold!

End Over

Shadowed shapes loom out of the flat, pale twilight of pre-dawn. A car, hops madly from patch to patch of ground-loving mist, rushing, lights off, towards some destination. The last fateful day of Earth had just begun.

A clawful affair

Throughout the far flung reaches of the tidal pool, floating on eddy currents, spiraling against the flow, bits of news touched rock and shell and fish alike – the “Crab” was dead!

Was Life

In the last years of the twentieth century, the rains fell – little did we realize the seeds of humanity’s destruction lay dormant in each drop that fell. Once it was, that water was life! But now, mid-way into the first century of the new millennium , death stalks even the smallest drop.

All in good time

“Wind blows, fire burns, rain falls, and all that is on Earth settles to nothing more than a handful of dust!” The guardian rasped out the ancient litany, last of her kind, ready for the passing over… it was her time, but she would have to wait; another millennia to be exact!

No one wants

Like a faded blue tuft, solitary in a fields of green, it lay there defying all attempts to identify it from a distance: singularly ugly, abandoned by accident, by choice – the hat that no one wants…

Assasin

In the extreme small hours of the final day of occupation, he stood silent and contemplating at the semi-open door of their room, waiting, watching, listening to the concert of breathing issuing from man, woman and child. The ghost, smiled, and descended upon his victims; in decreasing order of size.

Sentinel

Days come and go, drifting by like clouds of imagination, too distant to grasp and remember, too similar, one to the other to stand out clearly. Still. Lying as silent as the earth. He lay wide eyed and still. Alive. Waiting.

The Wastes

Vast waste lands, stretched out beneath my feet, like a day’s old beached whale finally free of the pestering of a Greenpeace Rescue Team. The glistening of the sun’s reflection, almost too painful for the eye. Petroglyphs dance! Petroglyphs unannounced in any guidebook seem to move with such liveliness as to almost free themselves from their tombs of ancient rock.

The Wind

There’s a rocking chair on the terrazzo, sage-green, grey and black, with regularly intermittent splotches of rust dotting its frame. it rocks by unseen hands – the hands of the wind, caressing it into each stroke of forward and back, a wind both gentle and fickle. There is something about it, this wind.

Peak Season

It’s the peak season. Small blue grey butterflies flit in the grass. The weather is noticeably cooler. More and more frequently, the winds pick their way the leaves and branches of anything green. Even the cats need attention – lots of it. Fair time has come to the Pearl River Delta: Canton Fair, Hong Kong, Dongguang and Zhongshan, all vying for the attention of buyers, and all during the same wee… It’s Peak Season!

Sounds

Midday. The air hums and shrieks with sounds: sounds of cars and trucks hurtling by; sounds of pruners hacking at the dead leaves of tall palms, browned off with decay; and the sounds of two cats seeking affection.