“But you’re a solider,” protested Anne, a mock-serious frown on her pretty face.  “Surely, you have to fight the enemy.  It’s rather in the job description.”
Captain Bleck chuckled, his broad chest shaking within the tight confines of his dress uniform.
“That’s what we want you women to believe,” he replied, a teasing edge just audible in his voice. “But don’t you think it for a moment.  Why, in Burma, in ‘62…”
The party had overflown the ballroom.  Couples strolled along the twilight paths, keeping discrete distances from one another.  The night had reached that familiar stage of mild inebriation when the taut edges were beginning to wear off formal manners.  Lucy knew this moment well.  It was the part she always dreaded - the part her sisters all seemed to like so much - and she wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to avoid all the depressingly eligible young men.
“Oh, you military men are all the same,” protested Anne, and Lucy stifled a yawn, because she had heard her sister use that phrase at least three times tonight already - to three different (but equally beastly-looking) men.  There was so much conceit there it made her want to scream; but the men seemed to like it well enough.
Lucy wanted to leave her discrete little seat in the gazebo - she was quite sure that horrid little man from the Admiralty had spotted her - could feel him looming up behind - but when she got up to go, she saw it was a stranger.
“Oh,” said Lucy, the barbed remark dying on her lips as she realised she has no idea who this man was at all.
He was an odd fellow - thin, and jagged, somehow, though not unpleasant-looking.  He looked very out of place amongst the well-to-do of society, and Lucy was suddenly struck by the thought that she would much rather spend time with this stranger than with any of the many people here whom she had known most her life.
“Oh,” replied the man, blinking at her with large , watery eyes, then gazing off into the murk as if there was something far more exciting there than the dimly-visible form of the creeping wisteria.
“Who are you?” Asked Lucy, half-hating herself for being interested enough to ask.  She made a point of never, ever, asking anyone anything at one of mother’s dreadful parties.
The angular man waved a hand vaguely in the air.
“No-one important,” he muttered, pleasantly enough, not coming close to meeting her eye.​..

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!

I'm not like the other schmucks.  That's the first thing you should know about me.
I mean, sure, I don't smell so good, and I like a delicious, fresh brain just as much as Joe Zombie down the road, but I'm different.
What you've got to understand is that I'm an original, true-blue 2012 edition.  Year Zero.  Retro, baby.  I didn't jump on the bandwagon like so many other zlobs.
That's what I tell the ladies, but frankly, I sometimes wonder why I bother.  They hardly ever listen to me anyway.  And isn't that just a sign of the times?
I haven't met a smoking hot zombie chick since the spring of '13.  Things were different back then.
Let me tell you...

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.
​ * * *