The beautiful illustration is by Olesya Hupalo, specially commissioned for this tory.

Several of my stories are available in greetings cards - if you are looking for odd little things to send to odd little people on their birthdays, or for other occasions, maybe have a look.  This one isn't on a card yet; let me know if you want it and I will make one!

The throbbing in Tom's jaw was like a box of bees.  He couldn't imagine a pain worse.
"But I saw the damn dentist last month!" he complained.  "I ain't made of money."
He tried to hold out another day, but it just got worse.
"How much will you charge to take the tooth?" he demanded.
The dentist told him.  It was too much.
Tom cursed.
"You could sell me the pain, instead," suggested the dentist.
Tom had heard about such things, but he was wary.
"You won't go taking nothing but the pain?" he asked.  He had good memories he wanted to keep, strawberries in the sun with Lisa, and his mother's voice when he was a lad, and the feel of his son's hand in his own.  Technology wasn't perfect.  Mistakes had been made.
"Not a thing," promised the dentist.  He strapped Tom in and put the induction helmet in place.
THRUM! Went the machine.
And, CLICK!
And, "Wow!" said Tom, sudden relief flooding his mouth.  The pain had vanished.  Where it had been there was just a silky, blank whiteness in his mind.
"All done," said the dentist.  "A clean extraction."
Tom nervously prodded his memories.  Everything seemed in order.  And after all, there was no pain.
The dentist paid Tom the agreed price for a grade III toothache.  When Tom had left, the dentist logged via secure server to the Department of Corrections and uploaded the pain, for which he was paid twice as much as he had paid Tom.
"Ow!" shouted the convict the next day, when the toothache was applied.  "Stop!  Please, stop!"
"And you won't ever do it again?" said the Judge.
The convict swore he would not.
He left whistling.  The first thing he did was buy a whole basket of strawberries.


The End

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Yule
Caleb came back to the city.  He was sixty, but he looked older.  He had been broken, cursed by a medical man who snagged him with the malediction of “neuralgia”, and thereafter all hope of painless nights left him.
On the train, he couldn’t feel the way the carriage moved under him, and he stumbled if he did not watch the scenery through the window.  During the days, he felt nothing; it were as if his legs and the tips of his fingers were made of cotton wool.  At night, the pain came.
His wife was dead and his brother was dead and his mother and father were long dead and dust in the wind.  His son was alive, but they hadn’t seen one another for years.  But the best years of his life had been in that city; now that every day, every breath, his life seemed to close in tighter, he found that there was no-where else he wanted to go.
The old building still stood where he had left it, all those years ago when he had left her, when he had left their son.  She hadn’t changed the locks.  There was dust everywhere and tired sunlight slanted through the still air.  He walked through dark rooms, unsteady, peering.  There were holes in the walls, but even the rats had deserted this dead place.
Caleb opened the door to the courtyard.  The glass had been broken and the window was boarded up with thin chip-wood.  The courtyard was small.  The winter sun was already dipping behind the brick walls, and Caleb felt an anticipatory tingling in his toes.  This was the one hour of the day when his flesh felt alive again, perfectly balanced between oblivion and agony.  As the light faded, that tingling would kindle to something awful and clawing, fingernails shrieking their sharp pain down the inside of his skull.
The garden was bleak and dead.  The boughs of a few tress, scraps of twigs and old, old leaves, and no wind to stir them.  He closed his eyes and tried to remember them, tried to picture his wife and his son.  But all there was behind his eyes was blackness and the red swelling of pain.
The sun sank and Caleb was alone in the darkness.

"Dig for the bones!" shouts Commander Cross, and the men do as they are bid.
Before long the air is full of dust, and not a hand there that is clean.  Sweat sticks, hearts hammer, and the sun beats down, heavy and uncaring.
It is Bants who strikes the hard white, pulling back at once like he has been bitten, and giving a cry like a babe.  Commander Cross comes a-running, pushing forward while those around draw back.
He reaches down and heaves up the find in one weather-beaten paw.  It is a thigh bone.
"Here we have it, lads," says he, waving the thing aloft.  "We've found him!"
He turns and starts scraping in the dirt with his own two hands, which is just as well because no one else would go near, for gold or a clean death.
Commander Cross piles them high, one bone on the next, and soon the sorry fellow is out of the earth, skull and scapula, wrist and ankle, a rain of little finger bones, all gnawed white and shining.  Not a scrap of flesh is to be seen.
Only when all is found does Commander Cross stop.  The air is very still, and the men make not a sound.  They are standing there, hands on shovels, tense and full of fear.
"Time for the music," Cross tells them.
The Commander looks around, and not a man of them will meet his eye.  Jennings is the first.  Slowly, reluctantly, he steps forward and reaches into a deep pocket.  He pulls out the bells and starts them to sing.
"That's the way," says the Commander, and all there follow, until the air is full of tinkle and ring, and all the little bells sing their song.  It is a music of far away, a music from across the ocean on the other side of the world.
The bones remember the music, as the Commander knew they would.  They were bound to those bells under different stars, and the old magic is strong in them.  First a shift, then a scrape; the bones twitch and wriggle, moving one to the next, lining up and kissing close.
Commander Cross smiles. He whips his hands about, and the men know what he wants.  They ring the bells harder.  The music swells in the air, and the sun seems to dim.
Commander Cross watches the bones rise, and remembers the day he was robbed.
​ * * *