“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.​..

​When the icecaps melted, people were surprised.
Not at the water that came pouring.  Everyone had been expecting that.
It was the flood of stories that took everyone off guard.
Tales of woolly mammoths, of desperate tribes caught between the devil and the frigid blue sea, of trickster gods and their whole lost pantheons.  They unthawed, came marching out of the icy wastes in which they had frozen solid whole ages of the world gone by.  They wondered what we had done with the place in their absences.
It was all very strange.
Water had been expected, but how do you build psychic dikes to keep your mental ramparts from being overrun by tales frozen for ten thousand years?
It was tricky.  Minds were saturated, short-circuited; ran amok.  People suffered.
But then, the ancient stories had a terrible time adjusting to the modern world, too.
Those wonderful old tales - each unique, each springing from some long-lost tribe or ancient, doughty people - were simply not prepared for 24/7 streaming services, for always-on-demand, for the ubiquity of franchises, for crossover event movies.  They were not expecting lines of action figures, or T-shirt merchandising, nor for the endless need to promote and exploit themselves by appearing on soul-crushing reality TV.
In the end, most of them decided it was too much bother, and went back into storage.  Now they are sleeping again - the woolly-mammoth-stories, the lost-tribe-stories and the rest - resting still and silent in those gaping, hopeful vats of liquid nitrogen, lined up beside all those other Hollywood dreamers, waiting patiently for the dawn of a better day.


The End

This story is due to soon appear in a new collection, Worth Dying For.
The artwork is by Olesya Hupalo, specially commissioned for this story, and it is as wonderful as always.  Olesya is a tremendous artist, and if you read my stories you will probably know she has done artwork for many of them.  She is also Ukrainian, and thus things are rather difficult at the moment.  You should check out her work, and if you need any art doing, please consider her.  There is an NFT of this story, including Olesya's wonderful art.  If anyone buys it, I will use the funds to immediately commission more art from her.
This story is also available on YouTube, if you can bear to hear it narrated in my tremendously annoying voice.

He told them what they would get, and the Poor Souls had to have it.
Quince sold lives.  He had done it forever, and his clients never said no.
"What is it for you today, sir?"
"A Life, please," breathed the Soul.
"Isn't that grand?" Quince would say.  "I have just the thing!"
Quince would hold up the glimmering Life.
Poor Soul and Life would fuse in a hallucinatory maelstrom of colour, vanishing into the world beyond...
One day - or rather, one instant; here, there was not really such a thing as time - god came to tell him there would be some changes.
"Cutbacks, Quince," said god, looking contrite.  "We're all feeling the pinch."
"But I'm already swamped!" complained Quince.  "How am I meant to manage the elephants, too?"
"Out of my hands, I'm afraid."
"But you're God!" complained Quince.
"Not God," corrected god.  "Just god.  Everything's run by Committee nowadays.  None of us are more equal, and so on.  Wish I could help you, Quince, but things are tough all over."
With that, god vanished in a slightly wheezy puff of nothing.
* * *
At first, things weren't so bad.  Quince had a system: the normal Lives went under one side of his desk, the pachyderm Lives went under the other.  This was important, as both sets of ephemeral, trans-dimensional objects appeared virtually identical.  But Quince was gradually worn down by the extra work, and eventually he got muddled.
"One Life, please," said the Poor Soul.
"Yes, yes," said Quince, irritated.
He snatched a Life at random and shoved it at his client.
Then he realised what he had done.
"No, wait, that one's not for you..."
But Quince was too late.  He had given an elephant Life to a regular Poor Soul.
He thought about filing a report, but this would generate so much paperwork that he decided to bury the incident instead.  Initially, he thought he'd got away with it, but then...
"One Life, please," said the Poor Soul.
"Here you go," said Quince, handing out a regular Life.
"Oh, not one of those," clarified the Soul.  "One of the special ones, please,"
Quince glared at the Soul.
"What do you mean?" he said carefully.
"Oh, you know.  The other type.  One of the good ones!"
Quince looked the Poor Soul up and down.
"What 'good ones'?" Quince demanded.
The Soul looked frustrated.
"It's all anyone's talking about!" said the Soul.  "I wouldn't be surprised if it's all anyone wants from now on.  The big, grey Lives!  Everyone knows they're much better!"
Quince looked at the Poor Soul suspiciously.  
"Do you even know what 'grey' is?" he asked.
"Not as such, no," admitted the Soul.
"I see," said Quince. "And who put you up to this?"
"It was Bessie.  He told us all about it.  Sounds great!"
Quince had heard enough.  He was just about to slap the Soul with a regular Life, and dismiss the problem in a puff of incandescent luminescence, when a thought occurred.
"Why not?" said Quince.
He gave the Soul what it wanted.  From then on, he gave them all what they wanted; and what they wanted was to be elephants.
* * *
god came to visit again, as Quince knew he would.
"Whatever are you doing?" god demanded.  "It's a disaster!  The whole system's getting backed up!"
"I'm so sorry," lied Quince. "Out of my hands, I'm afraid."
"Just stop giving the elephant Lives to the regular Poor Souls!" said god.
"Wish it was that simple," said Quince apologetically.  "Problem is, now that you've given me the elephants too, I have to think about consumer rights, don't I?"
"Do you?"
"It's the law," said Quince.  "You know, Justice.  Key ethical principle, that.  Things are tough all over," he added, spitefully.
 god fumed.  Then he vanished.
Quince had hardly served another Poor Soul when god came back.  This time he was carrying an official looking bit of paper.  He appeared rather dishevelled.
"Here you go then, Quince!" scowled god.  "Now give me the bloody elephant Lives back and start doing your job again!"
Quince examined the paper.  It was a seal of notice, market with the signatures of nearly everyone on the Committee.
"So from now on I only have permission to hand out the normal Lives?" Quince clarified.
"Looks that way," said god, tightly.  "You didn't leave us with much of a choice."
"And you're not just going to take away the elephants and give me hedgehogs or something?" pressed Quince.
"Of course not!" snapped god.  "We're not bloody stupid!  If we did that I'm sure it wouldn't be long before we'd find loads of people wandering about inside hedgehogs.  That would be a thorny problem!  No, we've learnt our lessons with the elephants.  From now on, you're only allowed to do humans.  Is that clear?"
Quince smiled thinly.
"Clear as crystal," said Quince.
"I better go then," said god gloomily.  "Now I've got to find some other bugger to do the elephants!"
With that, god vanished, taking with him the pile of elephant Lives.
Quince grinned to himself as the normal Lives rearranged themselves under his desk.
He was glad that god knew so little about what Life was actually like.  If the Committee had known, of course, they would have understood why Bessie had remembered enough about Life to get the other Poor Souls so fired up.
After all, whoever heard of a hedgehog having a memory so good that it survived reincarnation?
"Next, please!" said Quince.
The queue shuffled forwards, and Life went on.


The End

Inevitably, I have made this story available as an NFT.  You can find it HERE.  As mentioned in the caption, this beautiful illustration is by Emma Scott - thanks Emma! :-).  If you like my stories (do I deserve to call it 'my work'?  Or is that just pretentious?) then - if you can afford it - please consider supporting it buy buying one of these collectable NFTs.
Or just let me know you like the story with a comment here, and give it a share on social media - then let me know your wallet address, and I'll send you a free one.
​This story can also be found in the collection A Clean Death.  Let me know if you think there should be a print version of this. 

And finally...
...what should I write next?
My writing time is severely constrained right now, but I'm thinking of trying to pen a short story or flash fiction soon, if I can manage it.
What should I write?
Choose a magazine from this search website and let me know where I should aim my sights - I'll try and write something to submit to them; then, when they inevitably reject it, I'll post it here on my website, especially for you...

​Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled.  The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.
Lazarus sighed.
“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.
Lazarus stared at his friend.  It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time.  No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity.  Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.
“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated.  He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility.  It was full of promise, full of potential.  But Lazarus knew how things would go.  It was always the same.  How could he express that to his friend?  Was there a word for it?  The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million mom§ents, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…
“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss...

She was too young to die.  
That’s what Chloe had screamed, as the car hurtled out of control, ploughing over the roadside barriers, and careening down the steep mountainside towards the rocks and crashing waves below.
“Nope,” said the voice next to her.  “Just too Chosen.  Assuming you look lively and use your powers, that is.”
Chloe looked over.  A huge badger was sat in the passenger seat, regarding her with large, inscrutable eyes.  Behind the badger, the rock face continued to flash by outside the window.  Only it had slowed to a crawl.  Something odd was happening with time.  But that would have to wait.  Right now Chloe had odd animals to deal with.  She would move on to the odd other stuff in due course.
“Are you...death?” Chloe asked the badger.
The badger stared at her solemnly.
“Only to earthworms,” it told her.  “Now come on.  I’ve slowed time down, but there’s only so much I can do.”
“Hmm?” said Chloe, whose previous experience of talking badgers was approximately zero.
“Chop chop,” urged the badger.  “Make with the powers, already.  Unless you want to end up spread over this very pretty coastline, that is.  Your choice.”
“But I don’t have any...” she started to protest.

"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.
​ * * *