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.