Magenta Monster

Light Through the Window (first published on Red Monster)

The light coming through the window is milky white and the light insipid, the girl sits at an equally dirty grey laptop writing, wondering when the lunch bell will ring and release her from the torment of getting those sticky thoughts she can not abide down on the screen page. The screen page is also a dull white infused with that slightly grating light that hurts the eyes, it is draining, the colours of the world have tarnished in its glow. Headache sets in and she longs for sleep but she may not as she is just killing time.

Time, it seems is, not so easy to kill, though it was the killer that had taken so many away. That is the reason why she sits and stares and types meaningless nothing. The funeral is at least three hours away and there is nothing but her own mind for company – a mind that in substance and actuality is the pearlised grey of the sleet clouds that roll lazily over the world outside her window.

Her mind feels like the clouds nebulous and stark in soaring latitudes that pummel the ground with a ferocious torrent. The girl longs for the golden warmth of autumn sun but the harsh sun of the summer never came and the world is still locked in the winter-esque throes. Warm and damp and above all grey. The azure blue was but a memory the world has dimmed, and the girl waits.

And waits but still the clouds slowly shuffle across the blanketed sky and she awaits the rituals of death that have no meaning for her.

She would cry if the greyness would leave, but it will not; perhaps this is a good thing as beneath it is the black and red of angry despair and such a soul as hers that has been drained of its colour could not take their strength nor vibrancy.

I stand on the brink of the world, here in the mountains were I can see the pin pricks of light and the ghostly forms of leviathans I know to be the cities buildings, ribbons of lights show me were the transportation arteries flow. I try not to look at the sky, I know what I shall see there, something others can not, but I can not help it and my eyes shift to the sky and my breath seizes within me once more.

There they are in the sky, partially obscured by the rolling wisps of cloud stained dark with with the night. The sky is the blue of ice beneath the mountain of ice, it is night but there is a translucence and light is flowing from some far away source. I have wondered if it is the world beyond but have to confess to not knowing. There is movement up there, great cogs, glowing faintly and half seen clanking into place. There is writing on some of them, as a child I would try and read it but the words are not my language though the letters are the same if apparently styalised.

I used to be happy about them there in the sky, they are only visible at night but then there came a day when I asked what they were and why they were there. I had not known that others could not see them. My friends melted away as specialist after specialist prodded and poked, then came the medicines which far from making the cogs in the sky go, made other terrors appear. I wept as deamons sat on my chest at night and squids of iridescent colours poured out of the walls, they shock their heads and changed the tablets and for years there was nothing. Oh the cogs were still there but I was too tired to insist on their existence anymore.

I’m off of the medicines now and my energy has some what return – I no longer mention the cogs though nor the light. But the last few nights I have been unable to ignore them there turning in the sky, for they clank around and the smaller ones fit into the bigger ones and there is dance there that is leading towards something. I do not know how I know this but it has been gnawing at me and so I stand here trying not to watch them but time is growing short and I wonder what the fate of those in the city below will be?

Part of me fears that they will regret not listening to me.

Story Starters are a twitter meme started by Solorian were writers share the beginnings of potential stories to help each other get going with the whole writing malarky – here are another ten of mine – use and abuse them 🙂

1) The crystals came from only the deepest of mines, blood and sweat was all that released them from the darkness, sometimes they would sing.

2) The Dwellers began to stir sending a chemical reek from the pit

3) The Lord of Chaos ruled over the Domain of Random

4) Darkness swam up from the depth clouding his vision

5) Was it her imagination or had the sky turned red?

6) Pine cones bobby along the horizon – ridding the waves with a clumsy grace

7)Glass slippers? That was basically what they were – did that make her Cinderella?

8) It looked like a skate board with a tesla coil barely contained at it’s nose

9) Ivy had grown on the walls, the high thick and slightly worse for wear walls.

10) The rubble strewn playground was his playground, his bare feet tough and dusty

Elsa followed her mother out of the door, Dad was gone, she wasn’t sure where, just gone, ‘I can no longer look after you,’ the woman said in a tone as dead as the autumn leaves that still littered the floor. She was wearing the coat her gran had bought her before the fuel prices had frozen the old woman into the grave. Her mother hesitated with her fingers in the warm fabric, was she thinking of selling it?

The little girl looked up at the woman with eyes pleading for a hug but the women turned and marched forward grabbing Elsa’s hand and dragging her along. ‘Where are we going Mummy?’ she asked a little frightened.

‘You will see,’ she snapped and darted across the road narrowly avoiding the cars. It was already late in the day and the light was a silver glow she tried to snuggle up to her mothers leg. They walked out of town, and up the hill now devoid of trees, her dad had cut some of them down to get them through last winter – everybody had had the same idea and now there were no trees.

Was she going to the orphanage? She thought it was over the other side of town but didn’t want to ask, maybe she would go and stay with her Uncle Tommy and Aunty Sandra though she couldn’t remember them well, they hadn’t visited in a long time. No one visited anymore.

They reached the cliff edge near the old quarry lake, ‘are we fishing Mummy?’ she asked. The woman didn’t answer, Elsa wasn’t sure what happened but she must have lost her footing, she didn’t even scream as she slipped over the edge, the wind ripped at her face. The water rose as an icy wall she shattered in a blast of pain. The eons of the night seemed to claw their way into her mouth and into her lungs, darkness swam as she plunged downward the coat dragging her onward. She was fire then with nothing to fight with, just a burning that consumed her from the lungs to the brain, I am dying? she thought, poor mummy will be so sad.

Time skipped a beat and became erratic as she played with her new trike and the flew in the air to be caught in strong arms. Water weeds that were gelatinous caught her and held her form upright once more, little head nodding gently in the current. She opened her eyes, the world was a dark layered sky with strange vegetation sprouting here and there, she stepped forward untangling her hair and coat from the branches and looked around in the gloom. Wasn’t there supposed to be water? Wasn’t she in the lake?

Perhaps she was in an air bubble like in those films, maybe she could find away out and swim back home?

It was so cold here, like when the snows had buried the houses for six weeks and they’d had to dig tunnels to get to each others houses. She had thought it was normal but Daddy had said it wasn’t. She wondered where he was. He’d gone to find work but Mummy said he wasn’t coming back anymore. She’d heard whispers of soldiers and bread lines but none of it made much sense – perhaps Daddy had gone to be a solider?

Elsa began to shake with fear, it was so dark and she didn’t have a torch, but she kept walking over the purple brown packed earth, looking around her pupils so large in the dim light. It was so dark she almost didn’t see the lamp and matches sitting on a stone. It looked a lot like her Grandmother’s hearth. She crouched down to light it, her fingers were all pruney from the lake – she hated wrinkly fingers and how they felt the world but she was distracted from the thought by the realisation that her cloths where not wet.

She lit the lamp. A dark shape swooped over her, she squeaked in fear and huddled there but a soft hooting made her look up, the silently drifting shapes were owls!

She stood with her lamp and looked around her, there were a lot of owls all heading in one direction, she decided to follow them, if they had gotten in here they must know the way out and she could get out too!

In the distance she could see a large tendril crowned bulk, it was nothing but a darker black on the smudged grey of the sky. Pin points of yellow light began to appear within the tendrils, more and more of them were blinking into existence, as she got nearer she could see the feathered outline around each set of yellow lamp eyes – it was the owls!

Hundreds of them nested within an old dead tree. the trunk was old and gnarled and rather wide, a crack of blue light appeared and yawned into a glowing door way, a cool white entrance, she stopped and stared into its endlessness. Should she walk through the door or continue exploring?

A silhouette began to shift within the glom, ‘Elsa?’ came her Daddy’s voice. She dropped the lamp as she ran through the door it winked out. An owl hooted and swooped picking up the now extinguished lamp and set it down in the hollow next too some matches and swooped away to another tree with a red gash, a woman emerged a vine tangled around her neck. ‘Forgive me Elsa..’ she murmured before awaking to the realm of Night Owl.

People had pushed back the boundaries, repeatedly done the impossible and strived to move onwards and upwards. Stella was born in an age of inter galatic travel, she was upload and cyborg and a teenager. Her parents had been star hippies living on asteroids that float and drift between the systems. She was named for the stars and as she stared out at the stars on her first inter galatic trip she felt a strange feeling in her gut. Awe, fear, wonder and that thing teenagers have of wondering if there were going to be interesting people, cute people and other people on the voyage.

Of course there was a version of her left at home, a pre-travel back up and a molecular brain map, just incase. That didn’t stop the fear of self extinction and she trembled at the vastness of Out There. A girl who looked about her age approached her and smiled, the smiled was old and Stella quickly took in the white jump suit with pockets and cloths badges and things and knew this was Saskia one of the most decorated Captains in the known ‘verse.

‘You like the starscapes?’ she asked.

Stella nodded and turned on her hair mask. Her dark waist length hair became mottled with nebulea and star splatter. She had saved up for two years to get the mod done. ‘Ever been planet side?’

‘No’ Stella responded. ‘I’m an astro babe but we were at a different system every five years or so.’

‘You have slept then?’ the Captain asked.

‘Of course though my parents put it on dream-teach mode.’

‘You know languages? Maths?’

Stella smiled, ‘music and dance and martial arts, everything they could get their hands on, I’ve spent old life spans learning.’ It had been lonely, it wasn’t like upload, the dream teach, it was a closed system and the bots were purposefully not AI’s.

‘You are looking for adventure?’

‘Not really just new stuff, fun stuff but…’ her parents were not rich, they were hippies.

‘Ah yes you hope to find work as you travel?’ She nodded.

‘Good then lets see how fast you can earn your passage and board back then,’ and the captain smiled flicking her a data card. She caught it and raised an eyebrow forgetting it was the captain and not a peer she was speaking too.

‘you’re employing me to do what exactly?’

A merry laugh flowed from the captain and she patted Stella’s shoulder.

‘You will find out when you begin!’

And with that she was walking away. With one last glance at the stars Stella left regretful to seek the privacy of her room to access the data card.

Once back at her little cupboard of a room she keyed in her safety settings and slotted the card into her skin patch. She shut her eyes. She was standing in the heart of a sun, she couldn’t have said how she knew this she just did. She stepped forward and was caught in a plasma eddy and flew around and around. It was ecstasy, it was fun, it was – as far as she could see pointless, nothing more than a surfing game.

Then she saw the green flares that were the monopoles, and laughing she grabbed and tamed them so that she was riding the soul of the star. She wrapped them around themselves and found she could control the ejections. The solar flares and she was jetting away from one star and heading out into the void. The coolness was bliss after the heat of the sun. Not that the temperatures were anyway as extreme as they would have been. No one could yet survive that.

Catching a galactic gravity current she rode back to the star and chased sunspots across it’s surface and then she saw the purple haze. She swam into it’s mists and let them drag her down and then she felt a pulling behind and within her and she was floating up in a different star. It was not a yellow it was blue and thicker and she jolted herself out of the simulation. The ship was juddering and warning lights were blinking around her. She sat up and put an outer pressure suit upon herself before she had even registered what had happened. She climbed out of the room and followed her display to a designated safe area.

A panicked hour went by with the passengers staring at each other in mute horror but then the area decompressed and the warning lights dimmed. Breathing easier Stella went to the observation platform to see if she could work out what had happened. She gasped at the starscape, so different.

‘You did well,’ came the cool voice.

She turned and gapped at the captain.

‘It’s a new tech, you sucked us through one star into and through another, at the speed of thought. I do believe that was the best anyone has managed and it took you a fraction of the time.’

She shook her head this couldn’t be true. It was a game that was all.

‘You were super Stella!’ and she was walking away. Stella zoomed in on the nearest star, it was blue tinged and she felt her knees wobble.

Story Starters are little snippets you can used to start the writing process – here are ten more of my own that I am sharing with people.

1) The shadows! There was something about them, it was as if they had become solid

2) A tangle of darkness seemed to suck at her

3)Cheerfully they san songs around the campfire, the normality of it all nearly made her cry.

4) The hallowed halls of academia were tainted with something nasty

5) Glass? She seemed to be made of glass!

6) 16, 32. 64 the numbers were climbing in the hive, the buzz of what it meant vibrating the world

7) Moments glistened within the entrails

8) Starkness was the word he was looking for

9) The ghosts whispered

10) The girl sat upon the platform with chunks of sick strewn about her

Elsa walked along the beach of black gritty sand, the glass knife in her webbed fingers gleamed with wetness she had killed the shark, it was on the beach where none would touch it regardless of the amount of meat it held.  Not once she told the elders about the attack anyway.  Out of the team of five hunting for more of the precious magnesium nodules that littered the sea floor, she was the only one to return and as unscathed as she appeared she doubted she would want to do the work again not now.

But it didn’t make sense they had look outs, Malc and Tanctum had been on look out – how had they missed the sharks?  The water was transparent with the light rippling through it.

Elsa thought she saw why some argued the sharks were sentient and to be left alone but after today? She wasn’t sure they should be left, she felt a chill at the thought of exterminating the sharks – of hunting them down one at a time, taking out the packs.  Maybe the elders would have a better way?  Shark meat was her favourite meat as well but how could she eat it now after seeing the water clouded with red, ragged white frothed fragments of her friends floating around her.  Shark attacks happened Elsa knew that but not if you were in a group!

None had been reported for a long time but there had been a number of disappearances lately, Elsa gagged at the thought.

Tired and injured she couldn’t carry the corpse with her, she dragged herself up the slopes of one of the outer islands, she was safe, someone would find her. To her surprise Fentik was standing there watching her, his long rob had left a trail in the sand.

‘Elder,’ she said bowing as best she could but she was feeling… wobbly.

‘Come you must give your report,’ he said his flat nostrils flaring, she nodded and followed. The council all seemed to be there, she wanted to ask how. Slumping she told of how they had been hunting a shoal of sliver backs as a snack before hauling back a bumper crop of nodules when a shark was spotted, they didn’t get a chance to deviate before the other shadows seemed to appear from no where and the rest was frantic blood and guts.

With tears she said how Malc was a good look out and about just how clear the water had been.

‘You will not tell anyone this,’ Frentik said.

‘But sir we need to stop hunting them or completely exterminate them! Or something.’

‘It is… complicated, the shark you landed on the beach has been brought to my temporary work room, you will come and see why.’ Nodding and feeling like all she wanted was sleep she followed him. The sharks corpse was laid out on a bench, Fentik examined it grunted with satisfaction and pointed her to an area just behind what was left of it’s gills. They were it’s weak spot, it is how she had defeated the sharks.

There were three lumps, at first she wondered if it was a shark disease or maybe a species marker and then she saw, ‘but… those are glass!’

‘More than that they are optronic transceivers – we think that the sharks are being controlled.’

‘But who would do that? Why would they attack like that?’

‘We think it is a terrorist group, we have put trackers on all our fishers this last year, you are the third survivor, we are loosing so many that soon we will have to rely on our farms.’

She reached up to her necklace her webbed fingers touching the glass beads lightly, so that was how they had found her, their own version was it just a tracker? She hadn’t realised that their technology had reached that sort of level. People would not be happy about it if they knew.

‘So we can not fish?’ she asked as the true horror of the situation struck her.

‘It appears not and we will have to rely on boats and the like for travel between the islands,’ he sighed again, ‘a school trip was wiped out last week.’

She dropped to the floor in shock, ‘no…’ she whispered. Everything they were relied on swimming.

‘Once you are rested and heeled, you will begin training,’ he said and began to walk away.

‘Training for what?’ she asked a harsh brittle note to her voice.

‘You will become a shark hunter, tracker, and you will have weapons.’

‘Weapons?’

‘Light and glass.’

‘Luminous is real?’ she gasped, she’d heard the rumours but…

‘Luminous is real – now rest.’ And he was gone, her stomach flipped and she didn’t think she would ever sleep again, images of the carnage kept floating into her mind. She gritted her small pointed teeth and stood, she would first find someone to bind her wounds and then she would find food. She had to protect her world. She wished that the sharks had been sentient, that was a problem she could have delt with but terrorists? Their own people turned against them?

Shuddering she found a slave to help her, it’s fingers were not webbed but bizarrely they were good swimmers. Fentrik called them land apes, once there had been a war against them or the stock they used to breed them from, where or something. But that had made sense they were different. This however…

She closed her eyes against the pain and prayed to the dolphin god.

The dragon flicked it’s tail, a short impatient motion, and sighed heavily through it’s large cavernous nostrils, it was of course asleep and dreaming of days when it had once soared through the air and of the cataclysm that had trapped it here.

The sky itself had seemed to collapse in on the creature and it’s foot, the left one had been obliterated and yet here the dragon was here a life time on, it still lived in the voids beneath the rock. Initially the dragon had been hungry and then food had rained down through a hole it the roof, plump sheep and cows and pigs.

Occasionally about once a year a human female was trussed and gaged and wearing white robes that would fan out as the girls plummeted, would be pushed through the gap. The Dragon wasn’t really sure where they came from, they were too megre to be for it’s meal time and yet at the same time every year they would fall.

The dragon felt a sorrow for the girls but it was nothing compared to what it felt for itself, could the humans speak? It couldn’t remember but it was sure that they must have at least once, maybe this year it would catch her before she broke on the rock, maybe they would sing it songs, it remembered a song once and a child.

The dragon turned over, shot a small jet of flame from it’s nostrils and dreamt a new dream of pink stars and green cheese.

The grit stuck to her eyes, made them itch and burn, the humid heat pushed down crushing her lungs from the inside. Another brick was added to the load, her knees wobbled painfully. The smell of the flickering flame in the lamp, acrid and throat burning but it would not go out if it got wet. It cast an ugly yellowness to her already haggard features. She stumbled forward carrying the load away. The tunnel floor was slick with algae and bat feces. The sills on her boots were beginning to go, she would have to stay up and use pitch to seal them again tonight but weariness was already cutting into her deepest marrow, it was a leadened ache at her core.

The swinging rope ladder twisted as she tried to pull herself up. It was slow going the muscles in her arms sinuey and hard, popped out. It hurt – it was happening worse each day. Soon she would not be able to pull herself and her load up. Soon she would no longer be permitted to leave the mine.

She exited into the twilight. And deposited her bricks in a battered pull cart. She noted vaguely her son was tethered too it. He gave a vague nod and pulled it away. She clamped down on thought of others she had not seen for too long and staggered over to the clipped board welding man. ’24 loads today Usular, that is down they may dock your food ration for that.’ She stared at him with a numb bitterness. Then the laughter began to pull itself up ripping her stomach as it came. Less food, less strength, less work, meant less food. The laughter split the night and the foreman dropped his clip board. ‘You think that’s funny?’ he hissed.

She didn’t but she couldn’t stop laughing. A whole city lay covered in mud and ooze that they pumped out and she helped mine bricks for the new world, the glorious new world that her and her kind would never see. The foreman struck her to the ground, his clip board lay there, the stylis glinted in the last rays of the dying sun. Ursular wondered briefly if she would she another dawn, her sons solemn eyes haunted her. She picked the stylis up – the foreman wasn’t expecting an attack. He was felled and twitching and she was looking for the next one to kill before she was thrown in an airshaft to poison the deeper mines.

Whittling Wood (first published on Red Monster)

I watched Dad for a long time, the way he would whittle the wood, lifting it regularly up to his eye staring in a vague concentration. He only had a penknife to fashion his little miracles out of the chunks of wood he brought home from the wood yard. It had a red handle with the Swiss symbol emblazoned in gold. This time he was carving a hedgehog about 5 centimetres long with a wonky noise that followed the grain, and would give the hedgehog character.

It was pine but with a bountiful close grain and it smelt of lemons and limes to me. I was ten and my birthday was in the morning; the hedgehog, I knew, was not for me but for my little brother, so that he would leave me be to enjoy my presents. I didn’t feel as excited as I had in previous years; I knew there was no money, my grandmother had had to step in and buy new school clothes for me, and I had none of the set texts so would be carting around battered school copies with ripped pages and ink blotches.

I went to bed as he was finishing inscribing the lines on the hedhog’s back that were its prickles. I found sleep hard but eventually I slept and awoke to sunrays under my door and through my window – the light was a harsh white and it made me feel nostalgic. It was the first time I had ever felt that sad poignancy in my stomach and I savoured it, unsure as to whether moving from the warm cocoon of my bed would destroy it.

I got up anyway because all ten year olds secretly know there have to be some presents on their birthday even if there is no money. I snuck down the stairs in a Minnie Mouse nightshirt and hand crocheted orange-pink bed socks.

The living room table where we ate our meals contained a few small presents wrapped carefully in reclaimed Christmas paper and the card I recognised as a Christmas card that had been chopped and reincarnated. It had a Care Baer on it and I loved it.

Dad appeared from the kitchen and smiled, handing me porridge with a chocolate square on top. I grinned and sat down cross-legged on the floor blowing it to a coolness I could eat. The chocolate square was molten, though it had retained its shape.

Presents! I longed to open them and before I finished swallowing my last mouthful I was up and prodding at the parcels. Dad consented to let me open them then rather than waiting till after school for Mum to come home from work.

One was a geometry set from my grandmother – useful, practical and much needed for school. The next was my Mum’s oldest make-up set full of half used blues and pinks – it held no interest for me and I pushed it aside. Then, to my joy, there was a small balsa wood aeroplane, and another and another made with matchsticks and broken wooden pegs and other such things; I had a whole squad. Mostly they where biplanes, and I was ecstatic.

But there was one last present and it was the smallest, tiniest of all, but it was heavy. To my astonishment I uncovered a red handle that was so familiar but this one was half the size with only a few things, two blades, a bottle opener and a corkscrew. It was beautiful though the gold emblem had already been scraped off and the red handle had a blobby yellow scar from some glue repair in the distant past.

Grinning, my dad produced a box of offcuts and said I could choose three pieces. I grinned and looked at the wood. The first piece I touched told me what it wanted to be – a Chinese man with a large hat in the paddy fields – I made him for my mother, the second said it wanted to be skull and I made it for my brother. The third piece, why, it said it wanted to be a hedgehog and ended up with a very wonky nose – I gave that to my Dad.