Author: Alexander Fawn

He was quite sure the man wanted by the police was still in the house.

He also felt sure he could talk the man into giving himself up. They could talk it over between themselves first, then they could go together to the police station where the man could make a full statement, putting himself on the path of recovery. Facing the consequences now would lead on to a much better and happier future for him. When he approached the house, he found the front door was partly open. He went in and began searching each room, carefully. In the living room, at the front of the house, he found a large machete, just lying on a table. He moved on, going from room to room. He called out a few times, but there was no response. Maybe he was wrong. The murderer may have slipped out unnoticed.

Checking through all of the rooms again he returned to the living room. His blood ran cold when he saw that the machete was no longer there. At that same moment he could just hear the front door being closed, very quietly.

A long, long time ago, in the town of Nebazon, there lived a young woman named Maud. She was engaged to be married to Jonathon, a carpenter. Jonathan was a nice enough chap; not very bright, but he was nice enough.

His fiancée, Maud, was looking a little full around the middle. She was an attractive young thing and pretty smart. At least, she knew Jonathon wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, so to speak. It was his habit to call on her on his way to work.

Anyway, this particular morning she found Jonathon staring at her.

The conversation went something like this…

Maud: What’s up?

Jonathon: Oh, nothing.

Maud: No. Come on; what is it?

Jonathon: Well, it’s just that you are looking a bit…

Maud: A bit what?

Jonathon: A bit plump, I suppose. I know you’ve been throwing up in the morning.

Maud: Yes. OK. I’m pregnant.

Jonathon: Pregnant! How is that possible? We haven’t…

Maud: No. We haven’t.

Jonathon: Well, how did it happen?

Maud: How do you think?

Jonathon: I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you. I mean, you’re still a virgin, right?

Maud: Yes, of course I am.

Jonathon: Well?

Maud: God did it.

Jonathon: You had sex with…?

Maud: No! No! Of course not. He just snapped his fingers and did one of those miracle things he does, and made me pregnant.

Jonathon:  God made you pregnant?

Maud: Yes.

Jonathon: Wow! That’s really cool.

Maud: You think so?

Jonathon: Yes. That is so cool.

Maud: Right.

Jonathon: Well? Don’t you?

Maud: Um… yes, yes, I suppose it’s really great!

Jonathon: Wow! We have to let people know about this.

Maud: Maybe we should just keep this between just the two of us… for now, anyway.

Jonathon: No! We can’t keep a thing like this to ourselves.

Maud: You think?

Jonathon: Sure! This is far too important to keep quiet about. Come on! Let’s go!

Minutes later they are standing in the main square of Nebazon, with a small crowd gathering around them, including the town’s head rabbi.

The discussion went something like this…

Rabbi: What’s this all about, Jonathon? I trust there’s a good reason for calling people together like this?

Jonathon: Go ahead, Maud! Tell them. Tell them what you told me.

Maud: Eh! God made me pregnant.

Rabbi: Now, Jonathon, you know you’re not supposed to do that before…

Jonathon: No! No! You don’t get it! She’s still a virgin! God made her pregnant… you know …directly!

Villager One: So, what you’re saying here, basically… is that Maud tells you she’s a virgin. Right?

Jonathon: Right.

Villager Two: And you haven’t had sex with her.

Jonathon: Right.

Villager Three: And now she’s pregnant.

Jonathon: Yes.

Villager Four: So you think that God did it?

Jonathon: Well. Yes. What other explanation could there be?

Rabbi: Well, I must say, that is just so…

Jonathon: Yes?

Rabbi: It is just so…

Jonathon: Yes?

Rabbi: It is just so… wonderful! It’s a miracle!

Villager Five: A miracle! A miracle right here in Nebazon!

Villager Six: Wow! I thought that miracles only happened in Jerusalem!

Villager Seven: People of Nebazon! Let us spread the good news!

Later in the morning Maud is chatting with her best friend, Beryl.

The discussion went something like this…

Beryl: God did it?

Maud: I Know. I panicked!  It was all I could think of at the time.

Beryl: So who’s the real…? OK. OK. I won’t ask. Oh! I get it. So, that’s why the rabbi went along with it.

Maud: Well, put it like this; he thinks he’s the father.

Beryl: Well, you seem to have got away with it anyway.

Maud: Yes, but…

Beryl: What?

Maud: I feel as if everything’s getting out of hand. I mean, what kind of thing is this to have hanging over my kid’s head?

Beryl: No! Don’t fret. No one’s going to care about this for too long. Give it a couple of months and the whole thing will probably blow over.

Maud: I hope you’re right…

Not everybody would choose to live the way he does.

His shack is buried deep in the forest. His provisions and needs are basic. His contact with the outside world close to non-existent. One might well imagine that leaving the bustle of life behind, withdrawing from civilisation, choosing a way of life that allows him to live life as nature intended was his primary aim. From an early age he had always enjoyed the bounties of the forest, his long walks with his father, himself very much a lover of nature. On the face of it, you would think that this existence, this attempt to become one with his natural environment, to blend in with the forest, this desire to get close to the natural world, to live in harmony with Mother Nature, was all that drove him. You would think that.

However, despite its outward appearance, the shack’s interior is quite luxuriously appointed, with all weapons and unregistered cell phone provided by the Black Ops division of MI7.

On call 24/7.

Entering the world of fantasy,

While working with keyboard and pen,

Is easily done, when first begun,

By founding the where and the when.

–

Time away allows thoughts to gel;

A sense of solitude pushing through.

Will wisdom let you draw it in?

Will time allow it to brew?

–

Mollified by the quietude,

It surprisingly sets in motion

An allowance from the order of nature itself

To have fantasy procure a notion.

–

Allowing wandering thoughts to take form,

There are pleasing mysteries there.

Whimsical daydreams, hardly in focus,

And beckoning fantasies to embrace without care.

–

Imperfections surface, while the senses dance.

A maze appears, and a boundary’s crossed.

A notion takes hold, but is not understood.

A truth comes to light, but in moments is lost.

–

Based on things whether known or not,

But made manifest in a growing passion.

Seeing nuances revealed at a distance,

Interpreting, after a fashion.

–

Tampering with that which is way beyond grasp.

Attempting to transcend space.

Avoiding the scars of words unspoken.

Treating the unholy with grace.

–

Concepts unfold like gentle whispers.

Listen, lest the words take flight.

They give birth to a borrowed serenity,

While setting each nuance alight.

–

Epiphanies in time become mundane,

While continually taking stock,

Forever wandering in a single moment,

Yet filtered by the clock.

–

Retracing the steps made in moments passed,

Or content to just endlessly roam.

By some strange syncopation, the world runs on,

And the present moment eventually comes home.

–

Does the circling of birds stir the plot?

Does the breeze blow in something new?

Does the setting of the sun settle what’s done?

And what will the morning bring into view?

–

All rhythms and rhymes, slowly fade,

And the climb becomes more steep.

Allow all the clamour to drift away,

With the safety net of sleep.

–

All of this is easily done,

By creating the where and the when.

Just to be, by the sea, while holding the key,

To chalet number ten.

He had taken a short drive to his favourite stretch of the river for lunch.

He did this on occasion. It was a pleasant, grassy spot where it was peaceful enough to allow a person to hear the water dipping and churning its way through the narrow channel. It was just a five minute trip away from the halls of academia, where he lectured in philosophy at the city’s main university. He was well known around the campus and although widely respected, his somewhat overbearing sense of prestige and eminence had the majority of his students maintain a respectable distance. ‘Hail fellow, well met’, he wasn’t. This place was always quiet, and there was rarely anyone to hail.

He opened the plastic container and took out a sandwich that had been prepared by his wife that morning. As he began to eat, he considered the weather, the scenery and the food to be most propitious. It was his calling that had him think that way.

Meanwhile, the red fire ant was particularly stealthy in the way it ascended the inside of the scholar’s trouser leg. Eventually, once happy that it had found a spot where the skin was found to be at its most inviting, it bit down hard.

The pain struck like a lightning bolt!

He jumped up smacking his rear. He was doing this partly as an attempt to ease the pain and partly to ensure that whatever insect had brought the event about was dispatched to meet its maker. The location of the wound was his left buttock. His sandwiches were now scattered in front of him, no longer appetizing or edible. After dropping the spoiled food into a bin, he made his way back to his car.

As he went, he pondered the event. Intellectually, he considered that some universal imbalance had been at play. All in all, he was aware of the fact that the incident had played heavily upon his intellectual sensibilities.

For him it seemed to be totally unreasonable that such a tiny insect had been in a position to know exactly what was about to happen, before he did!

The craft hovered some sixty kilometres above the planet, just a little beyond the atmosphere.

They had travelled far and wide on their quest for the precious substance. Their needs for this would be hard to explain to any life forms outside of the GN-z11 galaxy, some thirteen and a half billion light-years from their present location. Their home planet’s survival was entirely dependent on the success or failure of their mission. The complex substance they search for is made up mainly of the two ions, chloride and sodium, with far smaller amounts of sulphate and magnesium. Should they find this highly prized commodity, their ship is armed with a quelling device that can be used to subdue whatever species that inhabits the planet in question.

Now, it just so happens, as unlikely as it may sound, this alien species had mastered the technology required to build a spacecraft large enough to contain a storage capacity of liquid comparable in volume to that of a small planet, along with the sophisticated technology to project sonic waves capable of subduing life forms. However, far more unlikely is the fact that they are incredibly incompetent when it comes to simple electrical devices. For example, the method used to activate the sonic wave projector is nothing more than a crudely made tin box with two wires coming out at the side and a small red button on top.

This state of affairs is brought into sharp relief when considering the fact that their method of mass mind control is accomplished by sending out powerful electronic-protoplasm, that has the attributes to not only sense living matter, but to emit stimuli. This is applied by firing off an ongoing ripple of vast, far-reaching waves of super-sensory vibrations, transmitted through the atmosphere that surrounds any given planet. This promotes a feeling of joyous rapture in the living forms receiving it, lulling them into a state of noctambulatery stupefaction.

If these strange creatures were capable of feeling the human emotion of excitement, they would be jumping for joy over their discovery. The vast quantity of the greatly needed substance being openly available on the planet being scanned was a find far greater than they had dared to imagine and all on one world. Finally, their calculations for the operation of piping literally all of the liquid, known to those below as seawater, onto the ship, were completed and the red button was about to be pushed. With some sort of fanfare that those below were simply not capable of comprehending, pushed it was.

Nothing happened…

It took several long, local days for the visitors to figure out they had a blown fuse on their hands. With the back of the control box opened and the dead item removed, it was used to find a match. After a great deal of rummaging around in the ship’s storage section, it was discovered that they didn’t have a spare.

If any Earthling was capable of understanding what was going on sixty kilometres up, they would have let out a deep breath, knowing that the removal of the planet’s oceans was not going to happen anytime soon.

As for those on board the alien craft with their dead fuse, regardless of the fact that their sophisticated mode of transport was capable of speeds a touch over seven times the speed of light, it was still an awfully long way to go back for a replacement…

The structure suddenly appeared early one morning.

It looked like a dome climber, the sort of thing you see in kids’ playgrounds. But it wasn’t a dome climber for several reasons. One being that these things are built in an allocated spot within the relatively safe confines of a children’s’ playground and not in the carpark at the back of a chemist’s shop. Another being that they are made of metal and not wood, more precisely, branches, tree branches. Also, whereas this structure has most of it feet embedded in the ground, some have sharp points that hover above the ground. Its uniqueness is further emphasised by the fact that several of these tips appear to be bloodstained. A feature being the main topic of conversation among the small crowd of locals that had gathered around it since the word got out that it had mysteriously appeared.

The chatter taking place was subdued, in most cases cautious murmurings.

“What is it?”

“No idea.”

“Don’t like the looks of those spear tips.”

“Is it blood?”

“I think so.”

“Does anybody know how it got here?”

“Not sure, but that woman over there seems to know something.”

“Like what?”

“Dunno, but she referred to it as a ‘horror bubble’.”

“A what?”

“A horror bubble.”

“Now, do you see what I mean?”

“Eh?”

“You know, what I was saying the other day.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how things get named, without giving it proper thought. Once the name gets around, it sticks and you can’t change it.”

“Ah! Yes, I do seem to recall you saying something about…”

“Of course! This is a really good example of something being misnamed!”

“I suppose it is.”

“It is. I mean, bubble! What kind of nonsense is that? A bubble, to be a bubble, has to be a sphere for starters.”

“Well, yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“Who said it?”

“What?”

“Who said it? Who called it a horror bubble?”

“The woman over there, wearing a red hat.”

“I’m not surprised. Doesn’t she tell fortunes or something?”

“Not sure.”

“There you are, you see? Classic, I tell you. It’s all about misdirections.”

“Look, shouldn’t we report it or something?”

“Nah. It’ll shrivel up and disappear when the sun’s been on it a while.”

“It will?”

“Yep, seen it before.”

“You have?”

“I have.”

“OK then. What are they called?”

“If you want us to stay friends, don’t ask…”

The young clerk sat looking bewildered at the handwritten note.

It read; Owing to a farrago of spatchcocks, I had no time for omphaloskepsis. It would be a case of lucubration in my phrontistery, in what would probably be a sisyphean of sorting through the imbroglio to identify the delenda.

It had been left by the proof-reader the day before, along with a great many heavily edited pages. It was evident that there had been no attempt to follow up on any of the insertions, corrections, or relocation of paragraphs or sentences, or any of the multitude of alterations suggested by the editor. The most notable aspect of the material was the fact that so much of the proposed text had been struck through with a red pen. He rightly considered it would be best to wait until the manager came in, but meanwhile he would read it through several times. Surely, he thought, this would have to help! It didn’t.

On arrival, the manager of the publishing company was presented with the problem. He looked through the marked up copy before reading the note. He looked up and smiled at the clerk. “Ah! Yes, I see he didn’t have time.”

The clerk looked no less perplexed.

“Let me explain,” said the manager, reading as he went. “Owing to a farrago, that being a disordered mixture, of spatchcocks, meaning hurriedly inserted text, I had no time for omphaloskepsis, or navel-gazing. It would be a case of lucubration, meaning studying into the night, in my phrontistery, his place of study, in what would probably be a sisyphean, a futile activity, of sorting through the imbroglio, a confused mess, to identify the delenda, those things that needed to be deleted.”

He looked at his young employee and smiled encouragingly.

“He tends to talk like that, but as I said, he didn’t have time.”

The shadowy figure standing at the bottom of the bed was whispering softly.

The sleeper was now awake, woken by hearing his name. His mouth was dry and his eyes stung. He lifted his head and peered around in the near blackness of the bedroom. The spectre was barely visible, but it was there. The peculiar muttering continued. The voice was saying, “The line between life and death is always there. Never more than a hair’s breadth between. A lost moment, a sudden decision, a chance encounter. It is a scarcely observable membrane that separates the two. There are so many of these. Like digging into an underground cable, falling down an abandoned mineshaft, standing too close to a collapsing wall, clearing a machinery jam with the power on, walking too close to a roof’s edge. Such a brief moment. A split second’s decision or indecision. Fiddling with the radio tuner while driving, swimming too far out to make it back to land, travelling too fast along a slippery lane, allowing a frayed electrical cable to come into contact with water.”

The words paused for a moment. In the silence, the man laid trembling.

Then, after a sigh, it went on. “So many moments; there is smoking near a gas leak, taking a shortcut through a construction site, stepping out into traffic, being lost in a desert with no water, standing too close to someone infected with a lethal virus, taking pills without checking the label, losing your balance at the top of a ladder, falling through a damaged roof, jamming a foot while crossing railway lines, getting clothing caught in rotating machinery, falling while not wearing protective safety clothing, passing beneath falling masonry, wearing inappropriate shoes on slippery surfaces, tripping over unseen obstacles, descending a lengthy flight of stairs with no handrail, running through a dimly lit area, losing your footing on a mountain track, and of course, there is always allowing a frayed electrical cable to connect with water. Did I mention that? These really are endless, you know.” The apparition chuckled. The man heard the flap of a cloak and the sound of a bony finger running along the edge of a blade.

Still shaking, the man rolled over; he was now extremely parched. He reached for the water, then stopped… In the dark, he fumbled with the bedside drawer and took out a torch. He switched it on and scanned the end of the bed. Nothing. He swung the torch around and saw that his water glass lay on its side. He rolled out of bed and switched the light on. He stood quivering, taking in the sight of his glass laying in the tray that had filled with water. Moving closer he saw the frayed cord from the clock laying in the tray. He pulled the plug from the power point and stood shuddering, while he drank what little there was left in the tumbler.

The voice came once more.

“Be thankful, that I like to cheat sometimes… between visits.”

He was sitting in a quiet reading area of the school library when he saw her approach.

He could see she had something on her mind. He reflected on the fact that she always seemed to have something on her mind. That was just the way she was. Some of his fellow class mates regarded her as a ‘live wire’, while others only saw a ‘busy body’. He had never made up his own mind, but felt there was no real harm in her. He watched as she wormed her way between tables to join him, obviously bursting with something. She quietly pulled out a chair and sat down in front of him.

Looking around, she whispered, “What I’m about to tell you is a secret and you must swear that you won’t tell anybody.”

He put his book down and studied her for several long moments.

Feeling slightly embarrassed by his silence, she went on, “You understand don’t you, you can’t pass this on? I mean, there’s no way you can tell anybody.”

He sighed. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t help you,” he repeated, “I don’t do secrets.”

She giggled softly. “Oh! Come on! Everybody does secrets.”

“Maybe most do, but I don’t.” He held his palms up to her in a gesture of submission. “Never have,” he said with complete sincerity.

Feeling deflated she slumped back and contemplated what she was hearing. “I don’t see how that is possible,” she said, frowning.

“I can assure you it is. I’m living proof, if you like.” He smiled and picked up his book.

“No wait!” she blurted. “I mean, someone could tell you one, a secret I mean, but without you knowing at the time that it actually was a secret.” She grinned. “You have to admit that.”

“Yes. You’re quite right about that, of course, but I have the possibility of that covered.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “And how do you do that?”

“Sorry, can’t tell you that.”

“Whyever not!”

He winked. “It’s a secret.”