Flash Fiction: In...

In my youth, I saw them often. They came, through the trees at the foot of the garden, and gazed upon the house. Once, I saw my mother go and speak with them; an exchange of bundled items, I fancied, and then a parting. When I spoke to my mother of it, she scolded me for making wicked lies. My baby sister cried less after that.

After a time they stopped coming and I came to believe it was a fiction, a dream. But lately I have seen them again, watching, always watching.

My daughter cries so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hope Burns Bright

Image
I've just read through Avengers vs X-Men (yes, once again, it was on sale on comiXology - I swear, they don't have me on retainer). It's a fun romp - and the omnibus I picked up included the individual "VS" issues which expanded on some of the two-panel fights we saw in the main story, which I enjoyed immensely despite initial disinterest. The "Fun Facts" are what really sell it. But the main thing that was nagging at me all the way through was: Does Hope Summers even have an official character model? Seriously. Her uniform is all over the place. Sometimes it's two chevrons, sometimes the lower one is a belt, sometimes it's mid-torso, sometimes that top one is more of a solid triangle. I guess her design includes the rag hood and nobody thought about what was under it? I dug around and found that this seems to be a fairly constant issue for the girl. Here are some samples, some from AvX, all (I believe) from official sources. It's pos
Read more

Have You Scanned Your Nectar Card?

This question offends me.  Every time I hear it.  It's insulting and insidious, and here is why. It comes from the self-checkout machines at Sainsbury's supermarket, if you try to pay without scanning your Nectar card. The machines at Tesco have a different strategy.  They entreat, "Please scan or swipe your Clubcard."  There is the same intent, the same insistence, the same assumption that I wish to be a part of their covert market research campaign and have simply forgotten.  And this, I don't mind.  Because I am part of the system, I do carry both cards, I will willingly surrender my shopping history in exchange for a minuscule (to the point of being imaginary) discount. But there is a subtle difference between the two.  Both of these only ask for my identification in the event that I have not already tendered it.  And yet J Sainsbury's have decided to phrase their request in the form of a question.  Not "Do you have a Nectar card?" or "
Read more

Both Caramel And Nuts

Image
"Snickers" (still often referred to in my house as "Marathon", no matter how long ago they rebranded) are currently running a competitive promotion. They're producing two variants, named "More Nuts" and "More Caramel"; you can probably take an educated guess at the difference between them. It's probably more apparent from the labels than it is from the contents, both of which taste like ... Well, like a Snickers bar. The "More Caramel" variant is packaged in an easily-identified tan wrapper. "More Nuts", on the other hand, is either the standard Snickers brown or so close as to be indistinguishable. Certainly shop staff appear unable to tell the difference as several times now I've seen them mixed in with the standard bars. At first I had assumed both variants differed from the standard bar. However I'm no longer certain this is the case. It's possible the wrapper colouring is intended to indicate that
Read more