Erp
Another day without a great deal to report. I slept well–and slept late, and spent the morning researching odds and ends for what may turn out to be a new story, or then again may not. The two strands I’m currently looking at are pagan belief in certain communities in America, and catastrophism in climate change studies. Of course, I may never use these, or not directly, or possibly only in passing, but it keeps the brain ticking over.
This afternoon I wrote a draft of an introduction to a series of short stories I’ve been thinking about (though haven’t written). This is one of a number of things that’ll sit on the hard drive, or, more precisely, Dropbox, until needed at some later date. What usually happens is that I come back to draughts I’ve written previously and substantially rewrite them, but that’s OK, because it is easier to revise a block of text than it is to write it in the first place.
Anyway, just for fun, here’s something, unrevised, from a random file:
The Teeth of Timothy Trask
There was once a boy called Timothy Trask who lived on a farm with his parents and grandparents. The farm was remote, and life was hard, but the family did well enough and were respected in the nearby villages.
No one liked Timothy. He was rude to everybody and always thought only about himself. At school he was always in trouble with the teachers for inattention in class, and a regular visitor to the Headmaster’s study for a thrashing. Often he would be in a room by himself because his behaviour distracted and disturbed the other pupils.
His parents were embarrassed and exasperated; they couldn’t understand how Timothy grew up to be so naughty when his brothers and sisters were not. He even behaved like that at home, and was always rude to his loving grandparents, mocking them especially for their insistence on leaving out a little bread and milk for the Good Folk at night, and a glass of sherry on High Days and Holy Days.
One day, just after his tenth birthday, he was sent out to gather mushrooms for a pie and, having nothing better to do, he walked out into the fields with a basket. He had been gathering mushrooms with his grandmother since he was very small and had a good knowledge of which were edible and which were not. He also knew, because he was told every time he went into the fields and hills, that he should never, ever, eat the clusters of mushrooms with the little pointed caps that grew in a circle on top of Hobs Hill, because these were sacred to the people who lived there.
After gathering a basket of the best field mushrooms, he had a mind to go up onto Hobs Hill to see what he could see. It was a lovely late-Autumn afternoon, and there was not a soul to be seen anywhere. His only companions were the rabbits that ran away as he approached, and the buzzard lazily wheeling in the blue sky high above.
On top of the hill was a ring of bright new mushrooms, dancing in the light breeze. Their pixie hats seized his attention. Why shouldn’t I have these, he thought. What nonsense Granny talks about people living here. There are no such people. And he picked and ate every single one of them.
By the time he got home he felt very unwell. The world was like jelly all around him, its colours running and changing; light flickered through his mind, distorting sounds, making his skin purple and translucent. He saw people in the sky, not human yet more than human, and they saw him.
He put the basket on the kitchen table. The basket grew five heads and hissed at him; the wood of the table flowed like molten toffee around his fingers. He ran upstairs to bed and fell into a deep sleep, dreaming strange dreams of worlds within.
When he woke up, he had no teeth.
They weren’t on the pillow and they weren’t on the floor. There was no blood on the sheet or pillow cases. His gums were flat and smooth as if nothing had ever grown there at all.
A year later, his empty mouth was filling up with adult teeth and the daily humiliation at school was fading; almost nobody called him gappy-gob any more, not even the teachers. There was a small party for his eleventh birthday in the farmhouse, but only his family came because he had no friends to ask.
At the end of the party, his Gran and Grandfather put aside a slice of birthday cake and left it out later with a glass of milk when they went to bed. When they were asleep, Timothy crept down the stairs and ate the slice of cake up himself, making sure he had every crumb, and washed it down with the glass of milk, making rude gestures with his fingers and crotch in the direction of Hobs Hill.
When he woke up the next morning, his baby teeth had all come back, poking out of the front of his gums, jammed tight into the roots of the adult teeth.
***
Music: Random cd picked with closed eyes from the shelf in the shed. Ozric Tentacles are a survivor of the UK underground scene, producing funky hippy music for all ages. They are the type of band that, if you like one album, you’ll like them all as they all mine the same seam.
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