Black Jack Gaunt dances under the full moon, and all the girls dance with him.
Out they come, from the huts and from the fields, against their better judgement and despite their parents’ pleadings.
“Don’t go a-dancing with Jack!” warn their mothers, “He dances to one tune, and no good can come of it!”
But Jack’s hips are limber and his bright eyes are cruel.
“Don’t dance with Jack,” say their fathers, “His feet are fleet, and he’ll dance you all away!”
But Jack’s slippery shape is alabaster beauty in the slanting moonlight, and all the girls do swoon.
So Black Jack Gaunt makes his dance, right there outside the village in the dusty ground, and not a man with man's-blood in his veins can come out to challenge him, for that is his magic, on this night which is his alone.
Now out comes Daisy, and all around would agree that Daisy is the fairest, the straightest-standing, so tall, so slender, so fresh and tender.  Out she comes to dance with Jack, and the world holds its breath.
Jack takes her hand and spins her in the moonlight, and the plumes of dust look like dark blood at their feet.
Black Jack Gaunt, he is the very devil.  He is handsome as a devil, too, for all his gauntness, for his movements pulse like life itself, and he is dressed in silken finery.
“Oh come back, girl, come back in!” calls her father, pressed up against the window of his cottage, and able to come no closer, “Jack is a stranger, and he’ll make a stranger of you!”
But the roar of blood is in her ears, and Daisy does not hear.
Before long, the moon begins to fade; but Jack has made his choice, and his night is nearly done.
Away he dances, and all around him drop the girls, like puppets with slit strings, down to the ground and down into sleep, deep, deep, deep, cold and silent and still.
Away he dances, and dances Daisy with him.
When the sun comes up, Daisy’s father can come out; but his girl is long away.
* * *
Black Jack Gaunt returns to his cave of brightly glittering carvings, and Daisy is in a swoon.
There are many fine things here, oh so many fine and glittering things; and each one was once a girl, just like Daisy.  Now they are merely things; oh, but aren’t they pretty?
Jack leads Daisy to a place by the fire and lays her gently down.  He gets out his cooking pot and all his special herbs.  And now he makes a soup.
Daisy smells the simmering pot, and stirs up from her sleep.
She looks around, all wide of eye, and wonders where she is.
Black Jack Gaunt reaches a long hand out into the darkness under the earth and snaps the neck of a deep-burrowing mole.  He pulls it back and smiles at her and starts squeezing it into the soup.
“My dear, my lovely,” he whispers to her, “tell me, what is your true name?”
But Daisy, who is sometimes wise, shakes her head and replies, “I’ll not give you that for free!” and shivers in the darkness.
Jack is patient.  He has played this game for many long years.
He shades his bright eyes and runs his nails through the mud, skewering seventeen fat ripe worms and stirring them into his soup.
“My dear, my lovely,” he cajoles her, “tell me, what price is your true name?”
And Daisy, who is sometimes brave, runs her slender hands down her tender thighs and replies, “The price of my name is that song you sing, the one that makes us dance!” and she licks her lips in the darkness.
Jack is slow to anger, despite the girl’s pride.  He needs her true name; the dance alone won’t do, and neither will the soup.
So he scuttles away to a corner where a pool of putrid water festers, and fishes out a stinking fish, white of eye in the darkened cave, and lobs it into the soup.
“My dear, my lovely,” he purrs to her, “this is the song I sing, though no one can sing it like me!”
And with that he sings the song for her, which no one before has remembered, because on Jack’s night when the moon is full, all the important things are forgotten.
And Daisy listens to the song, and locks it into her mind, and remembers it very closely.
“There, my dear, my lovely,” says Jack Gaunt, and his eyes are burning cold. “Now you have heard my song.  Will you not let me have your one true name?”
And Daisy, who will sometimes risk great things on narrow chances, bites her full red lip until the blood runs, and replies, “My true name is Black Jack Gaunt, and this is my cave, and that is my broth, and you are mine alone!”
Oh, how Jack does wail!
Up jumps Daisy – and singing Jack’s song, she dances Jack’s dance; and what can Jack do but dance too?
Daisy writhes and sways; and Jack is hers indeed.
She picks up the broth and spits into it, once, twice, and again; and now her blood is mixed in, and the broth is hers indeed.
Then, “Drink!” she commands, and of course he does; how can he do otherwise?
Jack shakes, and he howls, and he cries, and he pleads.
But Daisy, she is very cold.
Jack shrinks as he shakes, and glows as he howls.
But Daisy, she has made her choice.
Jack is gone: in his place, a brightly gleaming carving, beautiful and thin.
And Daisy, she is Daisy no more.
* * *
Black Jack Gaunt is gone from these parts, though his story is told in the hills.
Daisy never came back; and her father, he sickened and died.
But not long after she went away, many lost girls came home.  They tumbled and fumbled back from the earth, covered in mud and mildew, and not a day older than when Jack had danced them away.  Some were welcomed by fathers still living.  Others came home to find a hundred years had slipped by.
Now the mothers look to their sons, for Black Jack Gaunt had his dance stolen, and the woman who whispers the young men out into the moonlight is very thin and very beautiful, and no one has said ‘no’ to her yet.

This story is extracted from Of Blood And Iron.

“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.​..

“Seems unlikely,” she replied.  “Everyone here is someone important.  Or thinks they are.”
“Precisely, yes,” said the angular man.  “Well, I would expect as much.  That would account for the gradient.”
He wasn’t rude.  Not exactly.  But there was something about his polite indifference which made Lucy rather cross.  After all, she was the one who was usually politely indifferent to everyone else.  Having someone else do it to her seemed fundamentally back to front, somehow.
“Are you from the ministry?” she asked, finding she wanted to skewer his attention, if only so she could dismiss him once she had won it, thus returning things to their rightful order.
“Hah!” Exclaimed the angular man, still not looking at her.  “You might say that.”
He really did seem tremendously interested in that bit of darkness.  Much more interested than he was in - just for example - her.  Not that he should be interested in her.  Not at all.  And yet…and yet, she had to admit, she was rather used to the attention.  Perhaps she was more fond of that than she would like to admit.  Now there was an uncomfortable thought…
“Mummy had it planted last year,” she said, gazing at the wisteria and trying - failing - to muster a shred of interest.  “She caused it to be planted after daddy died,” she added, a shade maliciously, for she couldn’t say she really missed her father - had scarcely known him - and yet had discovered how profoundly uncomfortable comments like this could be for other people when effectively deployed.
“Hmm,” said the angular man, entirely unmoved.
That was it - the man’s complete lack of compassion for her imaginary loss was the final straw: she was Intrigued.
“Why,” she asked, with some irritation, “are you so bloody interested in - oh!”
This last came out in a gasp, for all of a sudden, Lucy saw something.
Something other than darkness, and quite different from the dim shape of the wisteria.
She saw - quite distinct, and quite, quite far off - people.
Lots of people.
A great many.
They were dressed in odd clothes - bedraggled and besmirched, tattered and torn from head to toe - and they were in peril, real peril, she was quite sure of it, though from what source exactly the peril threatened she found she really could not say.
She stuttered, tried to speak, found her tongue was tied.
“But…but all the pale people!” She managed to exclaim at last.
And then - for the very first time since they had met - the angular man really looked at her.  His big watery eyes seemed to swivel, to fix on her at last.
“You see them?” He asked her, quiet but very intense.
She nodded vigorously, almost not trusting herself to say a word - for she did indeed see them, tens of people, a hundred maybe - all spectral and far off as if from a great distance, and yet amazingly sharp and clear.
They were shouting now, screaming  and calling out, and she felt sure they were desperate to get her attention.  And yet she could hear not a sound - not a sound, other than the rather tiresome hum of the party around her in the garden.  And then, no one else in the garden seemed to be able to so much as see the little group.  No one was paying the many little figures a shred of attention - no one accept Lucy, and the angular man, of course.
“How deeply unusual,” the angular man said.
Lucy nodded vigorously.  The appearance of maybe a hundred spectral visitors in her wisteria did indeed qualify as unusual.
“Not them,” he clarified, nodding to the figures.  “Such poor things are depressingly common, in these sad times.”
They did look like poor things.  That seemed just right to Lucy.  They weren’t just sad though, she realised, and nor were they upset - they were terrified, mortally terrified.  And seeing their terror, Lucy felt a stab of it slice into her own heart.
“What’s…?” She started to ask, then realised that there was no time, no time at all.  For something was happening to the figures.  Even as she watched, the darkness lapped higher against them, lapped like dark water rising, and she understood.
“They’re drowning!” She exclaimed.  “They’re all at sea!”
A few of the other party goers were giving Lucy odd glances now.  She imagined briefly what she must look like, how wild and strange to be staring so intently into the darkness.  But she found she did not care about that, not at all.
“We must help them!” She cried, and then Anne was gliding from one side, taking her arm firmly - and not all that kindly - and hissing in her ear something she did not care to catch.
“But look, Anne!” Lucy protested.  “Just look, won’t you!”
Captain Bleck was beside her now, too, and several other braying military types behind him.  They seemed a touch kinder than her sister, but it was a kindness that was just one thin degree from patronisation, and Lucy misliked it immensely.
The figures were falling fast now, the dark water rushing up, their faces desperate, their eyes staring, imploring, begging.
And Lucy wanted to help, but she could no more help the tiny figures than she could overcome whatever wilful blindness kept her sister and the others from seeing them.
They were falling.
Even as she watched, a girl - a girl no older than Lucy herself - was swallowed up by some unseen enormity in the darkness, vanishing beneath the freezing swell.
“Come on,” said Anne, and there was a calm, severe fury in her words now - a severe fury at her selfish, idiotic sister who was ruining the party for her.  “You’ve said quite enough.”
Anne’s hand clasped tight on Lucy’s shoulder, and it was suddenly too much.
“Stop!” Shrieked Lucy.  “Get back!  Stop!  Stop!”
And then she was blinking and breathing hard, because Anne had done just that.
Everything was silent.  Everyone was still.
Lucy’s desperate eyes moved from her sister to the frozen, immobile bulk of Captain Bleck, and back again.
The world had indeed come to a dead halt.
In the darkness beyond the wisteria, the few last figures had stopped their desperate writhing.  They were as still as paintings, though quite horribly lifelike in their terror and distress.
“Stop,” echoed Lucy, but softly now, an automatic noise.
“Yes,” agreed the little angular man.  “Yes, we have.”
His eyes weren’t quite fixed on her, but Lucy had the feeling that the odd little man was looking at her quite intently; was looking at her much more intently, in fact, than he had been before when he had been idly talking to her.
“You did that,” she said after a moment.  It wasn’t a question.
“I did,” he replied solemnly.  “Well, I would have to go back over things, anyway.  When I’m writing up my report.”
“Your report, is it?” Lucy said.  She peered at the drowning figures.  How many were left now?  Could they still be saved, she wondered?
“Sometimes you have to let things play out several times,” the little man added, a shade defensively.  He shrugged.  “Then again, maybe not.  I’ve seen this sort of thing depressingly often, you know.”
Lucy shuffled forward.  She reached a hand into the darkness, tentative.  As her flesh seemed to pass through the tiny, luminous figures, she felt the faintest fission, tingling, sparkling feeling, like sunlight on frozen skin.  And yet she couldn’t touch them, not really.
“They need help,” said Lucy firmly.  “They need help, and you just watch them?”
“Oh, they do!” The odd little man agreed, a passion in his voice which surprised her, for she had not heard it there before.  “More than you can imagine!  But what can I do?  I’m not really here, you see.  My compassion is meaningless.  Only someone…”
And then he cut off, his eyes staring intently at the little figures, though Lucy felt quite sure he was really looking at her.
“Only someone who…what?” Lucy wondered aloud, then she shook her head as something else he had said caught up with her.  “What do you mean, you’re not really here?”
She prodded him in the chest, harder than she might have.
“Ow,” he commented.
“Seem pretty real to me,” she muttered, carefully not apologising.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he sniffed.
“Pretty convincing way of looking at it,” she replied, resisting the urge to prod him somewhere other than the chest.
“Yes, touch is convincing,” he replied.  “But does it mean that I’m really here?  Or does it mean that you…?”
He trailed off meaningfully, and Lucy felt herself redden.  How instantly she knew what he was getting at!  She thought of the endless procession of parties her mother threw, of receptions, of how sodden with boredom and hypocrisy they had always seemed to her; and of how little she had fitted into their world.
And this little man had wandered in from - from where?  Wherever it was he had come from, he had seen it all in a moment; seen it all without ever really seeming to look at her.
She was an outsider in her own family.  An outcast amongst her own set.  An alien, misliked, unwanted; resentful.
And then, as quick as that torrent of thoughts had come to her, the further implication of his words were sinking in.
Her eyes darted to her fingers, to where they fluttered against those distant, disturbingly clear figures, to where their pale faces flashed with incandescent brilliance just beyond the confines of her world.
Just beyond?  And yet, if they were beyond…how could she feel the echo of their presence?  How could she feel them, sliding against the very tips, the very threshold of her flesh?
“That’s right,” he said, very quietly.  And when she gave him a sharp look, she saw that though he was still apparently not watching her, that there was a silent attentiveness to him, a sense of a breath being held.
Her lips moved, and she almost found herself asking what he meant.  But to do so would have been disingenuous.  She knew what he meant, knew it with perfect clarity.
And to ask…well, that would just be another way of giving into her fears, her hesitations, her lack of faith - in herself, as well as (in a larger sense) in her family.
Her family whom she had always felt disconnected from, for almost as long as she could remember; felt embarrassed by; felt shame for.
But did they deserve that shame?  Ultimately, it would be easier to assume they did, and then not have to test them.
Not to have to test herself.
She took a deep breath.
Lucy did not know how she knew it, how she suddenly understood - and yet, there it was: she could almost touch them, almost touch those tiny, desperate, helpless figures.  And if it was almost, then perhaps…
Lucy let go.  Let go of a breath, and let go of her shame, and let go - just a fraction - of the world she had always inhabited.
And she moved.
She moved without moving, and almost became just about.
For a moment, it was like sunlight again, a wave of sunlight splashing over her fingers.  A moment later, she felt it for what it was: skin.  The slack skin of a cold, lifeless hand. Then - with a thunderous pulse, and with a rushing sensation like a last, desperate surge towards some far-off surface, the hand clasped back.
For a moment, Lucy teetered on the edge.  Some conflict was being fought within her, some decision, some impulse perfectly balanced between the ease of letting go, and the pain of holding on.
Lucy made her choice.
She tumbled backwards, sprawling, shoving her sister and the Captain away from her, in a space suddenly alive again with chatter and noise, censure and scorn.
Whatever she had done, Lucy had some how caused the angular man’s freezing of time to come unstuck.
She lay sprawling on the grass, the partygoers looking down on her in astonishment.
Her hand held something cold and wet.
She understood this at the same moment as she registered the weight on her body, and at the same instant she understood the soft, damp something pressed against her chin was hair.
She had pulled one of the figures.
She had plucked them out of the darkness.
She had saved them.
Lucy looked down.
A girl.
A little girl of maybe six, stared up at her with dark eyes.
The girl was shivering, convulsing.  Her skin was cold and tinged with blue.  Her hair smelt of salt.
“Lucy!” Said Anna, and though her voice sounded scandalised - as if Lucy had done the most dreadful thing imaginable - there was something else in her voice now, a hesitation, a lack of conviction.
Lucy ignored her.
She pulled herself up.  She was shaking too, as if the little girl’s shivering were contagious.  But it wasn’t fear Lucy felt now.
It was hope.
“Are you…?” Lucy murmured, looking closely at the girl, then hugging her tight.
She pulled back.
The girl only stared.  She was looking around, a stunned wildness in those dark eyes.  All around, the partygoers were staring back, unsure what to do.
Then Lucy noticed the girl’s leg, and she knew exactly what to do.
Clutching the girl’s leg, another hand held tight.  A thin, wiry, blue-tinged hand, and an arm extending away from it into the darkness behind the wisteria…
“Lucy?” Said Anna again.
There was still an echo of distain there, though much of it had melted away, replaced with puzzlement and with…with something Lucy was most unused to hearing there.
Lucy blinked in the darkness, and thought how odd it was to hear her sister sound sad.
Not just sad - heartbroken.  Utterly, utterly heartbroken - as if all the unhappiness in the world had suddenly crashed on her shores, as if the stern foundations of her life were suddenly crumbling.
“But…but where did she come from?” Anna went on.
And again, Lucy thought she sounded like her heart might break.
But Lucy shook her head, and shot her sister a dark look.
“Not ‘she’,” Lucy corrected.  “‘They.’”
She indicated the girl’s leg, and when Anna frowned again, looking as if her sadness wanted to scuttle away again into comfortable obscurity, Lucy reached out and placed her sister’s hand firmly on the hand which extended from the darkness.
Anna jerked, as if she would pull away.  Lucy held her tight.
“Help me!” Lucy hissed, staring at her sister, staring so intently, daring her to refuse.
Anna made a gasping noise; a soft noise, no more.
But when Lucy looked again, there were tears in her sister’s eyes.
Anna nodded.  She looked away.
Then Lucy let out her breath, and the two sisters pulled together.
They heaved, and out of the darkness a second figure came, tumbling up from the place where the wisteria hung in the sultry summer’s air.  And when the second thin, dark figure lay panting on the grass, when all around the partygoers looked on in amazement and disbelief, she suddenly understood.
She understood, because she saw at last what she had never noticed before.
She saw that the distain, the arrogance, the cruelty - all the foul things she found in her family and her set, had found in the whole world - those were just masks, too.  They were as much masks as the braying bravado of the Captain Blecks, as the disingenuous eye-fluttering of all the poor, lost Annas.
They were all lost, she realised.
They were all lost little children, all terrified that someone would notice, all desperate to convince everyone else that they were not.
The braying and eye-fluttering, the worldly laughter and the cruelty: it was all an act.
The night had been torn open by the arrival of these people, and it did not matter where they came from or how it had come to pass.  What mattered was that Lucy had pulled one of them through; and by peeling back the world, the spell those poor idiots had cast on themselves had been broken; the machinery of it all lay exposed, bleeding on the lawn.
And in that frayed moment, Lucy understood she had a chance, and she knew what she must do.
“Help them!” She commanded.
Her voice sounded thin in the fragrant night, and for a horrible moment she thought it would not work.  She imagined them turning to look at her, the masks of scorn growing back so swiftly that in a moment they would forget once more that masks they even wore.
And then Anna made a noise.
It was somewhere between a sob and a shout, and the eyes her sister turned on her were her old eyes - the eyes Lucy knew from when they were children, before scorn or propriety had a chance to fester there - and then she was lunging forward, hurling her body into the darkness behind the wisteria…and when she came back, in her arms she held another child.
And that was all it took.
All at once, everyone was moving.
Soldiers were throwing down their smart coats, were crawling on their hands and knees, were pressing into the darkness and coming back carrying shivering, sodden forms.
It all happened in utter silence, and with an intensity that was more real than any word Lucy had heard uttered at any of mother’s dreadful parties.
Lucy smiled.
Already there were more dark figures on the lawn than she had seen in that last frozen glimpse.  And more were being retrieved every moment.  It was…
“Magnificent,” observed a voice from her elbow, and Lucy turned to see the small, angular man.
He was looking directly at her at last.
Lucy hesitated, but the work was proceeding without her.  The grass under the wisteria had already degenerated into mud, each retrieved figure was soaked in salt water, and the whole of the lawn seemed in real danger of transforming into a small sea.
“Mother will be irked,” muttered Lucy, but even as she said it, she saw her mother working there amid the others, mud staining her splendid dress.  Somehow, she looked better for it.
“How…how did you know?” The small man asked.  “That they would help, I mean.”
Lucy shrugged.
“I didn’t,” she said.  “I’m surprised they did help.”
They were silent for a moment.
A hubbub of voices was rising now, rising from the darkly drenched figures.  Lucy could not understand the words, of course, but she felt sure she understood the tone.
Hope.
From the very jaws of despair: hope.
“You know,” she said, “you’re not really from the ministry at all.  Are you?”
The little man shrugged.
“I’m from a ministry,” he told her.  “People need ministries, you know.  There are always people fleeing.  And there are always people who do not - who will not - see.  Sometimes we cannot do much.  Sometimes we can only…only bear witness.  But, just occasionally…”
He trailed off.
“I see” said Lucy.
He looked at her, really looked at her.
“You know,” he said after a moment.  “I think maybe you do.”
A sudden stab of sadness clutched at her.
She wondered what her father would have done.  She had never given him a chance, she realised.
Would he be on the ground now, scrabbling away like her mother, trying - trying at long last - to do something real?
Lucy liked to think he would.
She would never know…but then, she could hope, too.
She could imagine.
She shook herself.
There was work that needed doing.
There always was.




The End

Thanks for reading!
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There is a limited edition NFT of this story, or rather there will be if anyone wants one...
​The beautiful art is by ShadowSantos.

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!

​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...

“Have you seen him again?” the girl asked, holding out her pack of cigarettes and producing a lighter from somewhere in her thick winter coat.
Jane knew the girl was too young to be smoking, but she didn’t say anything.  Who was she to criticise?  She knew she shouldn’t be smoking either.  She was far too old.
They lit up and sat shivering together, trying to crouch out of the reach of the wind and the drizzle, sheltered under the small overhang of Jane’s back porch.
Jane thought about lying, just as she had lied to the doctor, just as she lied to everyone who asked her that question.  But Tracy was thirteen or fourteen and hated her mother and her school and everything about her life apart from these small, snatched conversations, and Jane found it difficult to lie to her.
So she said, “Every night,” which was the truth, and she sucked deep on the cigarette and closed her eyes and thought about what David would say if he could see her now.
“Have you, like, tried talking to him?” Tracy wanted to know.  The girl had a thick accent Jane had struggled to understand when she had first moved back.  She had lost her own accent years ago.  But then, Jane had struggled to understand anything about her life when she had first moved back here.  What was the accent of one lonely, angry girl when you put it next to losing the man you’ve loved for half a century?  It had been such a small confusion.  Perhaps that was why Jane had been drawn to the girl.  She had been a tiny challenge, a puzzle slight enough to face.  Making sense of the bigger problems had been impossible.
“No,” said Jane, staring out over the cluttered concrete backyard that the estate agent had belligerently referred to as a garden, despite all evidence to the contrary.  “I know it’s not him.  I know he’s dead, really.  But I still see him.  When people walk down the street, when I go into shops.  I mean, I’m not mad or anything,” she added, giving Tracy a severe look.
“Oh,” said Tracy, looking down at her fingernails.  They were painted neon green today, Jane noticed.  She wondered what Tracy’s mother had to say about that.  Probably nothing.  The woman hardly seemed to notice her daughter most of the time.  “Is that sort of normal, then?” Tracy asked.
“It happens sometimes,” said Jane, though the truth was she wasn’t sure, not anymore.  The doctor had told her it would stop, that grief had strange fingers that played strange tunes with the way one made sense of the world.  The doctor had said that it often happened after a bereavement, at least at first, seeing your dead husband getting onto the same bus as you, or on television, or crossing the street.  But that had been more than a year ago now, when Jane had first come back to Birmingham, and there had been something unspoken in the doctor’s words, some hint that such distortions were normal, but only if they passed.  If they persisted, perhaps they were not.  They had not persisted last time, though that had been many years ago.  She told herself it was because the grief was bigger this time, which wasn’t true.  How could you compare two griefs that were both so huge?  Surely something so massive was always unique...

“I never saw my dad,” said Tracy, glancing at Jane then looking away.  She had big blue eyes that should have been innocent but weren’t.  “Not when he left.  Not once.  My mum said it was good riddance.  But then, I didn’t really know him.  And I was only four.  Maybe it only works if you’ve been with someone for years and years.”
Jane took another pull on the cigarette, relishing the harsh, acrid scent of the smoke as it crept down her throat and into her lungs.  It was odd.  She had not smoked since she left the city, fifty years earlier, and yet the habit came back to her as easily as slipping on a well-worn glove.  Perhaps it was part of the same thing that had driven her back here, when she was first riding the stormfront of her grief out of the ruins of her old life.  She had fled their years in the country, running before they could collapse around her and drag her down so deep that she would never be able to crawl out.  She had turned seventy-three this year; she had not been here since she left with David, five decades earlier.
“Maybe,” said Jane, though she knew that wasn’t true.  The same thing had happened to her when May had died, and May had only lived to be fifteen days.  She and David had both seen their baby often after she had died, though that had faded and vanished after a few months.  They had never had any other children.  They had not been able to face the thought, not after May.
Jane looked at Tracy, examining her smooth cheek and the deep blue of her eyes.  May had had beautiful blue eyes, too, bright and precious and sparkling like the ocean.  Jane had always wanted to travel the world, had wanted to explore every ocean there was.  But when May was born, she had thought no ocean would ever be as lovely as those blue eyes.  May closed her eyes too soon and forever, and Jane found she never had the heart to travel after that.
Still, they had been happy.  Now that David was gone, Jane understood just how happy.  They had had chickens and a little cottage with a vegetable patch and a stream that rubbed at the bottom borders of their land.  They had been happy together for half a century, despite the lack of children.  David had blond hair that turned white so gradually she almost hadn’t noticed, and arms that stayed strong into his seventies, and a heart attack that toppled him quietly from the world one Sunday morning while he was sat at the table, reading the morning paper.
Tracy took a final pull from her cigarette and threw it to the ground, crushing it out with a twist of her heel.  Jane looked at her.  The girl appeared a little older than her age, Jane thought.  She was tall, already taller than Jane, and she would probably be taller still.  But it wasn’t just her height, or the makeup she plastered on too thickly every morning.  There was something knowing about her eyes, something cynical and a little raw.  Jane wondered if it was that edge of cynicism that kept her from reprimanding the girl about smoking cigarettes instead of sharing them.  In her old life, she would have hated Tracy, would have had nothing to do with her.  But David was dead and the whole world had frozen, and the rules of her life had changed.   The girl had become a strange mote of warmth in a Universe full of cold, meaningless things.  Jane felt very little for anyone else, but she was fond of Tracy.  Fond in a odd, distant sort of a way that held no room for judgments about the way she dressed or talked, or the way she lived her life.
How old would May have been now, if she had lived?  Forty?  Fifty?  Jane tried to do the calculations, but her mind had felt thick lately, like sodden bread, and she found she wasn't sure.  Older than Tracy, much older.   
“Are you on your way to school, then?” Jane asked.  She knew perfectly well that while they had shared the cigarette, the girl had missed the bus.  Still, there would be other busses.
Tracy rolled her eyes.
“What, are you my mum now?” she asked.  There was sarcasm in her voice, but it wasn’t heavy or bitter.  Jane thought there was even a touch of irony there.
“Just wondering,” said Jane evenly.
Tracy huffed, but a smile was suddenly bursting out of her like a sneeze she couldn’t contain.  Jane managed to summon a small smile of her own, and the girl picked up her rucksack and slung it over one shoulder.  She paused, on the brink of saying something, one hand on the gate that separated the two properties.
“I’m glad you came here,” she said after a moment.  “I mean, its awful what happened.  And I know you wouldn’t have come here without it.  But it’s nice.  Having someone to talk to, I mean.”  Then Tracy opened the gate and left.
When she had gone, Jane threw her cigarette away, too.  She watched the last cherry-red inch of tobacco splutter and fizz against the rain, and thought yet again that there had never really been any choice.  If she had stayed in the cottage in the country, the weight of David’s absence would have crushed her to nothing.  She had felt it every day, from the instant she had come back to find him slumped in his chair, eyes open, a faint look of surprise on his face.  There had been no pain in his expression.  Just mild surprise, like he had put a strawberry in his mouth and realised it was a grape.  She had felt the absence as she had hauled him onto the stone floor and started chest compressions.   They had learned CPR together three years ago at a first aid course.  She had been sure the course was a waste of time, but David had insisted.  Jane had been right.  She had known at once the compressions would not work - the thing in front of her was not David anymore, it was just a complex layering of flesh and valves and vessels - and her movements had been rough and mechanical, devoid of either desperation and hope.  She had felt his absence during the days that followed, when the machinery of society swept through the cottage to take away his body and arrange what would come after.  David’s absence was like a paper cutout of himself standing always at her side, a white emptiness out of which blew a cold wind, and which in exchange drew in all the light, until she seemed to walk everywhere in shadows.
A low growl of thunder rolled out from somewhere far beyond the row of narrow terraced houses, which clung like disheveled mollusks to the borders of the city.  The rain came down harder, and Jane went back inside.


***


A few months later Jane began to notice the gaps.  They were small things at first.  She would stand in the kitchen, unable to remember why.  She would sometimes find a word tumbling around in her head and have no idea either what it was doing there or what it meant.  She had always loved words, they had always been her friends.  Now she had frozen up, and her words were deserting her.
“Slurry,” she would say to herself.  “Slurry, slurry, slurry.  Slurry, mellifluous, redolent.  Predicate, predicate, predicate.”
When this happened, she would turn to ask David, but David was not there.  So she wrote the words down, and kept the list with her.  But she was scared of asking anyone.  She was scared of what they might say, of what they might suspect.  She had suspicions, too; and the list of inexplicable blanks grew and grew.
“You left the door open again,” Tracy told her one day, when they sat smoking another cigarette on Jane’s porch.
“No I didn’t,” said Jane, but Tracy held up a necklace, beautiful, red-golden and topaz, a gift from David many years ago.
“You did,” said Tracy.  There was no reproach in her voice, just a slight undercurrent of concern.  She held it out, and Jane took it.  She stared at it, stroked it with a finger.  When she stopped stroking, the finger carried on by itself, trembling and rolling tiny circles in her hand.  She remembered the restaurant they had been in when he had given it to her.  She remembered the blue tissue paper wrapping and the dark warmth of his eyes and the taste of the soup they had shared.  How was it she could remember all these things perfectly, and yet not be able to recall what she had done the whole of Saturday?
“Sorry,” said Tracy.  “I didn’t take anything else.  But I knew you wouldn’t believe me otherwise.  You didn’t believe me last time.”
Jane dropped the necklace into a pocket, hesitated, drew it out again and slipped it around her neck.  She did not want to forget the beautiful thing again.  She wanted to cling onto it, grip as tight as she could, to the necklace, to the words that were slipping away, to every memory of David.  She felt as if she were unpeeling, like a dying flower, shedding layer after layer of translucent petals.  Soon there would be nothing left.
It’s eating me, she thought sometimes.  Eating me all up. Soon, there’ll be nothing left.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.  She wanted to promise that she would be more careful.  But then, maybe she already had.  Would she even know?
The year turned, the days growing longer and warmer.  The trees were full of leaves again, and the grass was green and fresh.  But inside her house, Jane felt that time had ground to a halt.  It seemed that the hours were telescoping in from either end, contracting into something dry and meaningless.  The world had changed.  She had been left behind.
“What’s your name?” asked the man dressed all in green.  The shadows around her lit up blue and red.  She shivered.  It was dark.  When had it got so cold?
She told him her name, and her date of birth when he asked her.  But when he wanted to know where she lived, Jane started giving the address of their old cottage in the country.  She stopped halfway through, confused, appalled at the white shards of nothing that were sliding through her mind, slicing her memories to shreds.
“Why were you out walking?  Where were you going?”
But Jane did not know.
She told them not to take her to the hospital, but the paramedics would not listen.  So she waited in the bright hospital cubicle in a blanket, feeling absurdly, irreversibly old, and waited as meaningless minutes dripped away into the darkness of the past.
“No, she lives alone,” Tracy was saying, though Jane could not have said when the girl had arrived or where she had come from.  “I’m her neighbour.  She doesn’t have anyone else.”
Later - how many days later Jane could not say - the two of them sat in a car.  Jane thought she had seen it before, but she wasn’t certain.
“It’s getting worse,” said Tracy.  “With my mum, I mean.  She shouts at me all the time.  I think she hates me.  Maybe I should run away.”
Jane looked at the girl’s face, trying to place what was bothering her.  The eyes were red and the cheeks were wet, but it wasn’t that.
“You’ve had your hair cut,” she said at length.  “That’s what’s different.”
A look of frustration passed across Tracey’s face.  Her brows furrowed then relaxed.  She sighed.
“I had it cut and dyed a few months ago.  Remember?  When I left school.”
Jane nodded vaguely.  It sounded familiar to her, but it was insubstantial and shadowy, like something spilling over from someone else’s dream, recounted in a thick voice in the middle of the night.  Should she have known that?  She couldn’t tell.  Suddenly, she felt scared, naked and broken.  Her mind was slipping away.  She couldn’t hide from it, she couldn’t hide it from anyone.
“I’m sure your mother doesn’t hate you,” she said, flailing desperately back in her mind for something else to talk about.  “Your mother loves you.”
Tracy gave a slow, lazy smile, twisting up at the corners of her mouth.
“You always sound posh when you’re trying to hide something,” she said.  Jane bristled, but there was warmth in the girl’s voice, and she lent over and - to Jane’s surprise - gave her a small kiss on the cheek.
“Come on,” said Tracy.  “We should get you there.  Let’s take you home.”
She started the car and drove.  But when they stopped, it wasn’t home, after all.


***


Jane was somewhere else, somewhere strange.  It wasn’t her home, but they would never let her leave.
It was a big place, with lots of rooms, and lots of strangers that she didn’t trust.  There were large rooms where they all ate together, old, slow people with grey faces and blank eyes.  And there were small rooms where they took you to sleep, and sometimes you recognised a picture or a pillow, but most of the time not.
Sometimes she thought she was starting to recognise the nurses, but just when this happened they all changed again - or so it seemed - and the only presence that never seemed to change was the black cat, the big black cat that stalked proudly from room to room, half-watching her from bright green eyes.
Sometimes she saw David, but he never seemed to notice her.  When this happened, Jane cried and cried, or sometimes screamed, or one time hit him, hit him as hard as she could because it was so unfair.  Then she fell down and wept, and then there was a sharp scratch on her arm and she dropped into a darkness so deep that she thought she had died.
But she had not died, she realised, because the dead do not wake up in odd rooms that smell of lavender and vomit, the dead do not look at their hands and find suddenly that they are the hands of a stranger, with skin as thin as rice paper and finger nails grown long and horny and horrible.  These things do not happen to the dead, she told herself.  So I must be alive.
Though if it was life, it was a strange sort of a life, and she was sure it had not always been this way.
Days came and were swept away, swelling up out of the dreary everlight of neon nurse’s stations overnight, sickly insubstantial days that went nowhere and then vanished again into neversilent midnights, almost before they had begun.  She felt something was consuming her, crouching hungry in the darkness, swallowing up every ounce she had to give, every mote.  She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there.  Things were as bad as they could get.
Beyond the windows, the world was wet and windy.  The leaves turned yellow, then red, and then they fell and decorated the grass with their wild colours.  The cat was out there sometimes, stalking amongst the leaves, relishing the wide, clean, cold air.  More often, the cat was inside with her - and inside, the air was too thick and warm, and smelt always of piss and detergent and the endless, tasteless food.
Jane did not speak anymore, not to anyone.  What was the point?  No-one here wanted to speak to her, not really.  No-one would tell her what she was doing here, or where here was, anyway, not even David.  David she hated most of all, for the fact of his betrayal, for his being dead and then not dead, and then being dead again, for the inconstancy of his abandonment, which she felt had ushered her into this inconstant world.
How was it that she could remember his name, when she had forgotten even her own?  People asked her what it was sometimes, asked her her name or the date or the year, or what is this object?  Or when were you born?  Or what was the address I asked you to remember, and what job do you think I do, and count backwards from twenty, and thank you, you’ve been very helpful.
Her indifference to the questions melded seamlessly with her unknowing, and she never answered them either way.
Time began to break down.  It had a funny way of rushing forward, then freezing, then running on without her.  She would wake up from a sleep that had gone on for hours, for days, for at least one hundred and fifty years, and it would still be dark outside, and she would scream at them and cry and cry and cry, because someone had forgotten to turn on the sun, and the whole world was going wrong.  Then they would tuck her back into bed, the sheets so tight that she couldn’t move her thin arms, and she felt that she could scarcely breath.  And they would lock the door and turn the lights off - even when she begged them not too - and she would sob herself to sleep.
And then there were times when she would walk into a room, and freeze open-mouthed, because she was seeing herself as a young girl, as a woman in her twenties, at her wedding, or in her herb garden, plucking idly at plants and turning and smiling and looking up.  These visions were always visible at a great distance, seen as if through a thousand miles of perfect, clear air.  She could see these things, these glimpses of a half-remembered past, but she could not touch them.  When she reached for them, they decayed into strangers doing strange things, and the nightmare swayed and flowed back around her, like a dark ocean surrounding a tiny boat.
Space, too, became odd and unreliable.  She found that the dimensions of her body itself were unstable, so that one minute she felt like a mote, an atom, a tiny speck, and the next it seemed that a single fingernail was the size of the known Universe.  Not only that, but these aberrations would slide into one another, so that she would begin by walking into a room hoping for breakfast and end by falling backwards into a Tuesday in 1978 spent with her sister - now long dead - and try to shout for help, only no one ever did.
She began to long for death.  Death would be so much cleaner than this wretched, hollowed out half-life.  But death would not come, however sweet she begged, and the nurses would never help her.  She took to telling them all, again and again, that this was what she wanted, this was the only thing she wanted: to die, for it to be over.
At least, she thought that was what she told them.  But how could she ever be sure?  It made no ends, for no-one ever listened to her.
And then, one night when she had lost all hope of salvage, as she lay once more in the endless, ageless darkness, a sudden something crushed at her chest and she thought - yes!  Yes, at last!
But it wasn’t death, not yet - just the cat, the old, black, nameless cat she had seen haunting the unstable corridors of this ever-mutable prison.  It had jumped, she realised, up from the floor and onto her bed.  Or fallen, perhaps, though fallen from where?  And how had it got in?  They always checked her bare room before they left, they always closed the door.
Still, there were plenty of places a cat could hide.  She began picturing them: in the wardrobe, or behind the curtains on the sill, or under the bed, or…
And then it occurred to her that her thoughts were much sharper than they had been for…for how long?  Forever, perhaps.  And this was followed by the thought that for her to be reflecting on the process of her thinking was even stranger.
“Perhaps I am dead, after all,” she said out loud.
“Not dead,” said the cat.  “Not yet.  But your story is nearly told.  I've been sent to offer you a choice.”
Jane lay in the bed, lay very still.  She felt the cat shifting its weight on her chest.  It was a very big cat.  It seemed, she realised, much bigger than it had any right to be.  It’s eyes were huge and green.
“Not dead,” agreed Jane at last.  “Dreaming.  Dreaming I still have a mind to dream with.  Does that mean I do have a mind, still?”
The cat shrugged.
“That’s a question for philosophers, not cats,” it told her.  “And certainly not for messengers, which is what I am today.”
Jane thought about this, then shrugged too.
“If it is a dream, I’m making the most of it,” she said.  “I’m not going to waste time wondering.  What type of message?  From who?”
“From my Mistress,” said the cat.  “She’s been watching you unspool for some time.  She can’t wait to eat you.”
Jane blinked.
“To meet me?” she asked, uncertain.
“Yes, that too,” said the cat.  “She’s been listening.  To your request.  She has decided to grant it.”
A spark of hope flared in her then; hope…but with a red-raw gleam at the edges.
“What request?” asked Jane, suddenly wary.
“Why, death,” said the cat.  “Of course, death - what else?”
She felt the cat tense, and then it leapt off her chest and onto the floor.
“Follow,” said the cat.  Jane lifted up the cover and stepped out.  Her body felt strange, light and precious and perfect, perfect in a way she had not known for…for how long?
She could not remember.
The floor was cold.  She followed the cat across the room and to the closed door.  The darkness did not matter.  Jane found that she could see very nicely despite the steep, inky blackness.
“There,” said the cat.  “Look there.”
And it pointed with its head, indicating a wall-mounted radiator.
Jane looked.  There was nothing to see, just a simple, bland thing of bent metal.
“Feel behind,” the cat prompted, so she did.
There was something there.  A light, plastic something that rattled when she shook it.
She held it up to her eyes, and examined it in the darkness - the darkness which didn't matter, for she could see it as clearly as if she stood beneath bright floodlights.
She read the label, and understood.
“There’s enough there,” said the cat.  “Mistress made sure of that, made sure when she made the nurse drop them.  Take them all, and lay down.  It won’t take long.  There won’t be any pain.”
Jane fingered the rim of the plastic bottle.  Then she flicked the lid, shook some pills onto her hand.  They rolled for a moment, then were still.  Her hand trembled not at all.
“And - then what?” she asked.
“Then your story will be over,” said the cat simply.  “And your stain will belong to her.”
She exhaled quickly, and did tremble then, a little, because it was what she wanted - it was all she had wanted, for so, so long.
From that moment she had found David, she realised, found him slumped in the kitchen.  She had longed for it to be over.  For it all to be done.
She put a pill in her mouth.  It was only small.  She swallowed it without any effort at all.
Then she took another.
And another.
And…
And yet…
She forced herself to stop.  To breathe.
Steady and quiet.  She wanted to carry on.  She wanted to cram the pills into her mouth, all of them at once, right then and there.
She took one more, slowly this time, placed it in her mouth, swallowed.
Paused.
“David,” she said.  “Is he there, too?  And my little one?  Will I see them?”
The cat just stared at her.  Then, slow and rather cruel, a smile spread, then turned into a huge yawn.
“No,” it told her.  “Of course, no.  That is not what she offers.”
“I see,” she told the cat, and frowned, like she was pretending to think, though of course her mind was made up.
Slowly, a little sadly, she poured the pills back into the bottle and screwed the lid shut.  Her hand was trembling again.  Then she crouched and placed it back underneath the radiator.
As she stood up, her legs creaked.
The darkness was creeping back into the room, and her legs felt thin and unsteady.
She walked towards her bed, her stiff legs jerking.  She was like a decaying clockwork doll, shuffling, stumbling, always on the verge of falling
“Are you sure?” the cat called after her.  It was not following her.  “Who knows how much more of this there is to come?  She won’t give you another chance.”
Jane was sure, but she found she could no longer say exactly what it was she was sure about.  Her thoughts were growing slippery again, and things were no longer meeting up.
“Chances, chances,” she managed to mumble, as she crept back beneath the sheets.  They were cold and slightly damp, but that didn't bother her.  A lovely, glowing warmness was beginning in her stomach, rolling out through her limbs, numbing her.  Her head felt very heavy.  “I’ll take my chances.”
But she was no longer sure what she meant.
Then something like a sigh came from the darkness of the room.  There was a creaking noise, like a door opening…but that was strange, Jane thought, because she could see the shape of the only door this room had, silhouetted against the sterile light outside, and that door was still shut.
“Oh, you’ll take your chances, will you?  Not the tasty little chances I would give you?”
This voice wasn’t that of the cat.  It was a feminine voice, but rich somehow, low and dangerous, like dark, poisoned honey.
Jane started, tried to get out of the bed again, but her body was weak, so weak she could hardly move, and it was all she could do to shift her head.  In the deep darkness of the room, a shape seemed to swell.  It was broad and bulky, like a car or a van….a wagon, perhaps.
Something moved, and she recognised the inky blackness of the cat as it leapt upwards and in through an open door.
And beyond the door, two ruby-pale eyes stared out at her, pretty as winter and quite, quite dreadful.
Jane wanted to say something, but she did not know what.  Perhaps she should scream, or cry, or laugh, even.  But no words came, and no sounds either.
Then there was a chuckle, and the voice spoke again.
“Well, you have been interesting,” it said.  “You would have been a nice little dainty, to add to my collection.  But you will not be mine, it seems.  A pity.  I do so like my dainties to have spirit.  Your bitterness would have been most splendid.  But it looks like you are not done and told.  Not quite.  Do enjoy your chances, wherever they lead you.  I know I will.”
There was a creak and a slam.  The door was closed.  A moment later, the room was empty again.
Jane lay in the darkness.  A rushing was in her ears, growing louder, ever louder and louder.  It was the rushing of a great river, the river of sleep, and as it came for her, as it bounded through the closed door and around the room, swirled over the radiator and past the curtains, under the bed, and finally crashed onto her, sweeping her off and away, Jane found that she was smiling, and wondered why.
***
There was cold wind on her face, and blue all above her, and in the distance the sound of waves.
Jane awoke, and for a moment thought of nothing, nothing at all, and all that was in her mind was the sky and the smell of salt and the air, which was freezing, but which felt endless and wonderful.  Then a sort of confused clamouring began to arise in her thoughts, the familiar discordant bleating that stirred up in her always as her decaying mind tried to make sense of the world, and failed.
“Are you awake now?  Can you hear me?” the voice came from a woman at her side who Jane had not noticed.  They were both sitting in low canvas chairs, both well wrapped up in gloves and winter coats, and facing out towards a blue-green mass of something that was so huge Jane was sure she should recognise it.
She tried to speak, but her throat was dry and she could not remember how.  Pills, she remembered.  Surely she had eaten pills.  That's what always happened.  That's what they always did to her.  Had there been more than usual?  She thought there might have been.
“Here, have some water,” said the woman.  She held out a cylindrical object that had no name.  Jane looked at it, baffled, and the woman moved her hand near the top, and pulled the top away, and suddenly it had become a bottle, and Jane understood that she should put it to her mouth, so she did.
The water was warmer than the day around them.  It felt lovely on her throat as it slipped down, and she smacked her lips and smiled and said, “Thank you,” in a hoarse voice before she could stop herself.
The woman smiled at Jane, and the smile tugged at her, and she knew that she knew the woman, but at the same time she was a stranger, so she looked back to the sea, feeling awkward and remembering she was sick, horribly, hopelessly sick.
The sea.
That was what it was called!
The sea.  Such a small word for such a vast thing.  It seemed to go on forever, melting into the sky in the deep, deep distance.
“I always wanted to…go to sea…” Jane trailed off.  She wasn’t sure what came next.
“You’ve been asleep for ages,” said the woman.  “We drove through the night.  They’ve probably already been looking for us for hours.”
Jane glanced back to the woman, who had produced a cigarette from somewhere and was offering it to her.
“Light it for me, Tracy,” said Jane, remembering suddenly who the woman was, and at exactly the same moment forgetting that she had ever not known.  “My hands shake.  Too much.”
Tracy did what was asked, handing Jane the lit cigarette.  Then she lit one of her own.
They smoked for some time in silence.
Then Jane said, “Aren’t you missing school?”
Tracy gave her familiar smile.  Jane had always liked that smile, she remembered.  And her eyes.  The eyes reminded her of someone, someone she loved.  She wondered who it had been.
“Not now,” she said.  “Not for years.”
“Oh,” said Jane.  She inhaled the cigarette smoke.  It tasted good.  It seemed like a long time since she had smoked.  Why had she ever stopped?  “What about your mother?”
“I’m not worrying about her.  Not any more.  I left.  It was time to leave, so I left.”
In the distance, a greywhite box floated on the sea, and got bigger, and suddenly became a ship, a ferry, springing abruptly out of a chaos of shape and colour.
“Good,” said Jane at length.  “I always knew you would, sooner or later.  You have to get out in the world, you have to…”
She trailed off, her mind flashing backwards, traversing half a century in an instant, and she remembered David, young and slim and smiling, and the smell of him, and the smell of their cottage in the country, which they had both loved more than words could ever say.
A trumpeting rolled across the ocean to where they sat, and Jane realise the ferry was coming into port, and she realised the two of them were not alone.  They were in a line, a queue of people, though most of them were standing, giving Jane and Tracy a respectful distance.
“I thought that you might like to come with me,” Tracy told her.
There was a clanging noise as the ferry docked, and a restlessness fussed through the crowd.
Jane thought about it.
The wind was fresh and clean and the sky was bright and Jane suddenly did not care if her mind was full of holes and shadows.  She had loved David and she had lost him.  She knew she was just a thin inch from losing herself, too.  All of her, every thought and act and smell and smile, gone, washed away forever.
But they had been hers; and this was what she wanted, this would be hers, too.  Her choice.
Jane smiled.  She squeezed the arm of her friend.
“You have to take your chances,” she said, and something flickered for a moment, on the edge of her memory, then faded, and it didn't bother her at all.
The sun was rising, a blaze of bright yellow gold in the deep blue sky, as the two women - one young, one very old - stepped out towards the boat.  It was going to be a beautiful day.


The End

This story is not drawn from any one individual person or event, but rather inspired from many real-life situations I have come across, both in my work and in my personal life.  The fortitude in the face of utter catastrophe that takes place every day, amongst our friends and family, to our dearest, to ourselves...there was something about that which I wanted to write about.
The lovely art is by artisticoo (https://www.fiverr.com/artisticoo) specially commissioned for this story.  I have not yet made an NFT of this story - if you think this should exist, ask me to do so in the comments below, then share the story anywhere on social media, I will mint 5 copies and gift you the first one free...

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...

I first met Melaena at some mall deal.  It was April 12th 2013, and things were still fresh back then.  It felt like we had direction.  Like we were going somewhere.
Anyhow, we had the humans penned in pretty tight, they weren't leaving anytime soon.  They had some sharpshooter up on the roof, but hell, how many bullets did they have?  We could wait.
"Hey sugar, how would you like to taste my grey matter?"
That was the first thing I said to her.  Pretty basic, I know, but those were heady days.  The basic stuff worked more often than you might think.
She smiled at me.  There was something I couldn't place at first about her smile.  It was special.  Then her lip moved, and I realised it was a maggot.  It was kind of cute.
Just then there was a crash as a group of humans decided to make a break for it out of some back door they didn't think we had covered.  I was so into this chick, though, I didn't even look up.
"I'm Melaena," she told me.
"Pretty name," I replied.  "What's it mean?"
The trend was to re-christen yourself with a zombie name back then.  Shit, we were such idealists.
"Blood in the stool," she explained, and flashed me a sheepish grin.  "I used to be a pre-med before..."  she let the words hang, and gestured around at everything.
"That's beautiful," I told her.  "I'm Rot."
I had to shout because one of the humans had just fallen over and they were screaming pretty loud.  If I had wanted my share of the brains, I could have gone forward and tucked in.  But suddenly I wasn't so hungry anymore.  Melaena was enough for me.
"Listen," I said.  "I know this great little bar.  It's real special, kind of invite-only.  You wanna blow this joint?"
She shrugged, and one of her shoulders flopped slickly in the joint.
Jesus, this chick was driving me wild!
"Sure," she told me, and that was that.
* * *
Gore's is a pretty special place, like I said.  Or rather, it was pretty special.  Some chain's taken it over now, and there's nothing much to write home about anymore.  But back in the spring of '13, Gore's was the place to be.
It used to be some top-secret research facility, back in the day.  Matter of fact, the rumour at the time was that it was where the whole zombie thing started.  I mean, everyone knows who did it now, of course, and why.  But back then, the whole thing seemed magical, and everyone had a theory.
Anyhow, Gore's was on the bottom floor of this humungous research building.  It was about ten stories underground, and it was big.  Difficult to bust open, but Gore managed it, and man, it was just like opening up a gourmet box of extra special chocolates.
That place was just chock-full of the nerdiest, smartest science geeks you can imagine.  The brains on those researchers!  Gore used to have them chained up behind the bar, thirty or forty of them.  He had a selection of hammers and whisks, and he made cocktails to order, real classy.
"So, you come here often?" Melaena asked me, lurching seductively into a seat next to me.
I shrugged, trying to play it nonchalant.
"Now and again," I told her.  "What would you like?"
Gore showed up just then.  He was a class act himself, skin as grey as gutter snow, and real sharp teeth.
"If I can recommend," he said smoothly.  "We have a very fine visiting languages professor freshly harvested from our, ah, vineyards.  The frontal cortex is, unfortunately, nearly all gone, but he does have a rather splendidly developed left tempero-parietal region, not to mention an especially juicy basal ganglia."
"Sounds good," said Melaena firmly.  "And don't stint on the CSF, huh?"
"I wouldn't even dream of it," said Gore smoothly.  "And for sir?"
"The usual," I told him.
Gore raised an eyebrow.  Half of it fell off.
"Sir intends to settle his bill soon, I presume?" his voice was polite, but I knew better than to underestimate him.
"What?  I'm not still good from those teachers I brought in last week?" I asked, not that I needed him to tell me.  You got credit in Gore's by bringing in a supply of the finer brains.  A zlob could get by on estate agents and bureaucrats, but shit, that wasn't real living.  People came to Gore's for that little something extra.  And that meant Gore was always on the look out for dealers who could keep his cellars stocked.
"Sir, please," Gore's voice was like honey being pored over an iron rod.  "There were only three of them.  And they taught at the community college."
I sighed.  This zlob was going to ruin my play if I wasn't careful.  I waved a hand at him airily.
"Sure, sure, I'll bring you something good.  Just get us our drinks and get out of our hair, huh?"
Gore bustled off to get the drinks.  In the background there was the sound of a buzz-saw starting up.
When I turned back to Melaena, she was staring at me with those beautiful green eyes of her.  Not that they were that far along, but decomposition comes to us all in time.
"You go hunting for this place?" she asked breathlessly.  "Wow, what a cool job!"
I spread my arms, trying to look humble.
"What can I say?"  I moved closer.  "I like to make a difference to society.  I want to do something that matters with my death."
From behind the bar there was a deep crunching sound, and what was left of the languages professor suddenly started singing something urgent in Armenian.
She nodded, looking serious.
"I don't suppose..." she started hesitantly, then stopped, shy.
"What?"
"Well, I don't want to be forward," she went on, "but I'd love to come with you one time."
I couldn't believe it!  The day was just getting better and better!
I shrugged, trying to play it cool.
"Word is, there's a wild pack of computer programmers that have a camp just North of the city," I told her.  "I was thinking of making a trip out there later this evening as it happens.  If you'd care to accompany me, you'd be most welcome."
Just then, Gore turned up with our drinks.
Melaena took a slurp of hers and looked at me with delight.
"That's incredible!" she exclaimed.  "Man, I can't believe I've been chowing down on car salesmen when there's good shit like this in the world!'
Gore looked happy.
"We aim to please," he said.
"Որ ճանապարհը դեպի ոսկե զուգարանից իմ ընկերը," said the visiting languages professor, but only very softly.
* * *
By the time Melaena and I got out of the city, there was a lot of sexual tension between us.  It was in the little things, like the way she laughed and tossed her hair back, or the way she swayed her hips so hard they dislocated with sexy little popping noises.  To tell you the truth, I was tempted to ask her back to my place right then and there, and to hell with Gore and this hunt.  But then, I had a feeling that half the reason she was hot for me was this mission of ours, and I didn't want to ruin that.  I decided I would just have to wait.
The sun was starting to go down and we were well out of the city when we started to see signs of our prey.  It was subtle, but I knew what to look for.
"See that?" I pointed at a flash of grey half-hidden under a bush.
Melaena nodded.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The outer covering to a 1982 Commodore 64, complete with attached tape deck and dot matrix printer," I told her.  "They're so close, I can almost smell them."
We didn't have much further to go.  Before long, a little string of smoke was visible, rising up against the muddy red of sunset.  If only the other zlobs had a tenth of my imagination, then these nerds with their juicy brains would have been history by now.  As it was, the country was rich for the pickings if you only knew where to look.
"Remember, we need them alive," I told Melaena.  "So here's how we're gonna do this.  You wait here in this bottleneck, and I'll circle round and flush them down to you."
"Then what do I do?"
"You lay hidden and the bushes and bite their ankles off as they come past."
The plan was simple enough, and it should have worked like a dream.
I climbed up through the bushes, then came in close.  They were lit up by their fire, and they couldn't see me at all.  Jesus, they were chumps.  I mean, they might have had big brains, but they were not wired up for practical thinking.  They hadn't even posted sentries.
There were five of them, four guys with bad hair and skin, and one chick who must have weighed two hundred pounds and was clearly their leader.
"Argh!" I shouted, and came stumbling at them out of the darkness.  That was when things began to go wrong.  I'd played this routine a dozen times before - usually I had a net or a pit or something waiting instead of Melaena, but still, basically it was the same plan - and it had never failed before.
Every other time, I only had to give a groan and a lurch, and those puny little critters would be high tailing it out of there as fast as their delicious little legs could carry them.
This time, things were different.
"Oh dear, not another one," said one of the men, sounding bored.  "Come on Ben, it's your turn."
"Mine?" said the one evidently called Ben.  "But it was my turn last week!  It must be Ralph's turn today."
"Fine, it's Ralph's turn," said the first man, not even looking up from the fire.
This left me feeling rather shaken, I can tell you.
"Um...Urgh?" I tried again, feeling as if I'd lost my momentum.
"Yes, yes, we heard," said Ben absently.  "We're all very terrified.  Oh dear, a zombie.  Gosh.  And so on."
This really wasn't going according to plan.  I decided that I would just have to take a bite out of one of them, show them who was boss.  I lurched forward as fast as I could, and heard something snap in my back.  It felt lovely.
The woman, I decided.  Get the leader out of the way, and surely the rest would fold.
I rushed towards her, and she rose in front of me like a great delicious fleshy snack.
Then something strange happened.  I was just reaching out for her, just about to grab her and reel her in towards my sharp teeth...and suddenly I was stopping.  My nose was twitching.  My hand was frozen in mid-snatch.
Something smelt delicious.  I mean really delicious.  I mean it was so amazingly, stomach rumblingly, mouth wateringly delicious that the smell just bypassed my thought processes and latched straight onto my muscles.  That's the only way I can explain it.  I just couldn't help myself.
My head swung round the to right, towards where the man known as Ralph was holding something up.  It was difficult to see in the darkness, but it looked like it was a bowl filled with dog food.  It glistened in the flickering light of the fire.  It was the source of the delicious smell.
"Here good zombiezombie," crooned Ralph.  "Does zombie want some delicious fresh brains?"
I had to admit, zombie did.
Oh well, I thought as the last threads of my self-control disintegrated, I'll just have a taste, then get on with the business of capturing these puny humans.
I fell on the bowl like I hadn't eaten in a year.  It made all the other trash I'd shoved down my throat since the Big Change seem like offal. Even Gore's shit seemed like cheap rubbish by comparison.
"Aw, he's sweet," said Ralph, patting me absently on the head.  "Can we keep him?"
"No," said the woman firmly.  "You always want to keep them.  Why do you always want to keep them?"
I finished the last of whatever had been in the bowl and licked my lips.  It had been delicious, but now things had gone quite far enough.  They seemed like decent sorts for humans, and I felt kind of bad about it, but we had to face facts.  I was simply higher up the food chain than them.
"Thanks for the food," I told them, standing up.  "And look, this is nothing personal.  But I'm afraid I'm going to have to bite off your ankles and drag you back to the city now.  It's kind of my job," I added, feeling like a bit of a Judas.
"You see?" exclaimed Ralph, completely ignoring me, and turning to the woman.  "He's just adorable!  Doesn't he make you laugh?"
To my horror, I realised that Ralph was right.  All the humans standing around the fire were either smiling at me or outright laughing.  That made my blood boil.  Enough was enough.
"Fine," I said.  "Have it your way."
I lunged forward and bit Ralph's nose off.
Except I didn't.
That's what I meant to do.  I sent the message to my muscles, I began to move forward...
"Stay," commanded Ralph.
I stayed.
"Bad zombie," said the woman.  "Don't you know it's nasty to bite people's noses off?"
As soon as she said it, it seemed...true to me, somehow.  I mean, deep down I knew it was the most natural thing in the world to bite a guy's nose off.  But on the surface, what she said sounded absolutely right.  I couldn't escape the feeling.  It was like her words were crushing me.
"It's sad, actually," said Ralph.  "He doesn't have any idea, does he?"
"Have any idea of what?" I asked.  "I'm sorry about your nose, by the way."
"About what happened to you," said the woman.  "About what happened to the world.  About what made you the way you are."
I managed to draw myself up at that.  Back then, we were such idealists, like I said.
"Sure I do," I said, trying to sound scornful.  "There's been an uprising.  Your day is over.  All the little wars, all the little petty corruptions, all the human mistakes...they're all gone, they've all been washed away.  It's time for your species to move over.  You can call it revolution or evolution, but that doesn't matter.  The point is things have changed, and your time is done."
"That's impressive, actually," said Ralph, one eyebrow raised.  "It managed to justify the whole thing without resorting to God once.  Usually, God's the first thing they cling to."
The woman shrugged.
"You think we should tell him the truth?" she asked.
I couldn't stand the way they were talking over me, so I decided to try and bite Ralph's nose off again.  It still didn't work.
"How about it, zomb?" asked Ralph.  "You want to be enlightened?  You think you can handle the truth?"
"There's nothing you can tell me that'll convince me I'm not talking to an inferior species," I replied.  "Now would you mind just leaning over and putting your nose into my mouth?"
I had to admit it, I was feeling kind of desperate by now.
The woman laughed.
"Nothing we can do to tell you?" she repeated.  "Fair enough.  How about something we can feed you?  Or maybe something we've already fed you?  That speaks for itself, really."
I licked my lips.  An icy tingling feeling was beginning to form at the base of my spine.  At first I thought it was just a fractured vertebra beginning to fill up with pus, but deep down I knew I was wrong.  Deep down, I knew that feeling was dread.
"Go on then," I said brashly.  "Do your worst."
And they did.
They just opened their mouths and explained everything to me.
And right then and there, on a hill a few miles outside the city, surrounded by computer nerds, right then and there was where I lost my illusions.  That was when the world changed for me.  After that, the heady days were over.
I sloped off back down the hill.
"You think we should have told him?" I heard Ralph asking the others as I left.
"It'll be for the best," the woman replied.  "If I was him, I'd want to know."
* * *
Melaena wasn't impressed when I came back alone.  She wanted to know what had happened, what had changed, but I didn't have the heart to tell her.  I said I'd made a mistake, that those chumps were real stupid, not fit for Gore's at all.  She listened, and I even managed to talking her into going to grab a few city hall employees - I always ate trash when I was feeling down - and for a while I thought that things would be OK.
But afterwards, sitting next to each other by the bodies, we both knew something was wrong.
"What's the matter?" she wanted to know.  "Was it me?"
"You were perfect," I told her quickly.  "The way you cracked that skull, the little slurping noise...You're a real classy girl, it's just..."
"Just what?" she asked.  "Was it too fast for you?  I'm sorry, I was just so hungry.  We can go slower next time."
"No, it's not that," I could hear the frustration in my voice.  "It's just...well, I ate a lot at Gore's earlier.  I must have been more full than I thought."
"You shouldn't feel bad about what happened, you know," she told me, putting a beautiful, slimy hand on my shoulder.  "It's very common.  You'd be surprised how many zlobs can't finish a whole brain these days."
She smiled at me desperately, and I tried to smile back.
How could I tell her the truth?  How could I tell her that after what the humans had fed me, after what they had told me, that I would never be satisfied with human brains again?
We went our separate ways soon after that.  We told each other we'd meet up again, but we both knew that was a lie.
I never saw her again; a few months later, I heard she'd left for Paris.  Good luck to her.  I hear a zlob can do real good for herself in the Old World.
Not long after that, some big corporation took over Gore's.  I'm sure you've heard of them.  I guess we all have now.  When that happened, the last thread of my doubt snapped, and I knew the heady, wild days were over.
* * *
So that was the story of the last smoking hot zombie chick I met, and how I completely failed to score with her.  To tell you the truth, it took me a while to get my mojo back after I had that truth-bomb dropped on me by those computer nerds in the woods.
Like I say, things are different now.  No-one's an idealist anymore.  I mean, some zlobs pretend they still believe we're the result of a government experiment or an extraterrestrial plague.  But we know the truth.  Deep down we all know.
It all made such perfect sense.  As soon as you heard it, you just knew it was true.
And when the big chain eateries started opening up again, was there really any doubt?
Turns out we were the result of a secret experiment, all right, but it wasn't the government that was running it.  Turns out it was just the marketing department of a rather famous fast food chain.
You remember the rumours you used to hear about what went in to burgers back in the day?  All the cheap cast off bits of meat, the bits that were no good for steaks, or even for sausages.  The bones, the eyes, the little stringy bits of gristle.
And the brains.
All those cow brains, millions and millions and millions of them.
They would just have been thrown away, otherwise.  That would have been no good.  They have to squeeze the last ounce of profit out of the operation, don't they?
That was why they commissioned the virus.
It was top secret, of course, and it was supposed to be selective, very subtle.
It would just worm its way into the taste centres of the human brain, flip a little switch, and suddenly cow brain wouldn't taste so bad, after all.
Turns out genetic engineering is a bit more tricky than that.
Turns out that it's not so easy to do something quite that specific, and certainly not without side effects.
One aspect was completely successful, however.  Once we had been infected with the virus, we became completely submissive to whoever it was that fed us the brains.
But hell, I don't mind.
After all, what have I got to complain about? I do alright.  Got myself this nice little eatery, where I serve old-style dishes for other old-style zombs, like me.
Even got myself a girl.  She's not smoking hot like Melaena - actually, she's a vegetarian - but what can I say?  She sneaks bean burgers into the Brain Jamboree when she thinks I'm not looking, but company's company.
I keep my own little collection of smart-looking humans right up there in cages above the counter, and a list of cocktails, just like Gore did.  I even still have the visiting language professor, what's left of him.  I'm saving him for a real special occasion.
Everyone looks the other way when the delivery van comes with the cow parts, but hell, what does it hurt to pretend?
I was there at the beginning, back when the movement seemed real, back when being a zombie meant something.
Does it matter if it turned out we were wrong?


The End

I wrote this story in 2013, which really does feel like a far-off world now.  It is one of 9 stories in my collection A Clean Death.  If you fancy supporting my writing, and/or are interested in digital collectables, this story is one of my 'entry level' NFT's, priced fairly cheap; it's like buying a badge from an indie band you like, something to proudly pin to your shirt.  Well, maybe to your virtual shirt when you venture out into the metaverse at some point in the next few years; after all, think how strange and quaint 2013 feels now; imagine what 2030 will be like, and what will be going on in the world of VR headsets and virtual worlds in which we can socialise virtually with our friends.  Imagine proudly displaying a copy of this virtual story on your virtual wall...

It had all seemed so easy.
Other gangs might kidnap rich brats.  Not us.
“The Mexican loves that horse,” Chang had assured us.  “Had it since he was a kid.”
“He’ll pay good money,” Jim agreed.
So we’d set it up.  Everyone had a role.
Fat Steve had looked the part in the fake nacho stand.  Looked more Mexican than the Mexican, who in fact had been born in Dakota and gone to school in Oregon.  Chang scoped the getaway.  He was waiting on the roof with the microlights.  There was a race passing near the city that evening.  Plan was to slip amongst them and get lost. Jim was meant to lose his shit at the food stand, just as the Mexican was passing with his entourage.  The weird bastard took his beloved little horse everywhere.
Me?  I was the grab man.
I’m fast, I’m slick.    
Only problem was, I’m not as young as I used to be.  And my knee’s not been right since that time in Dallas when…hell, that’s a different story.
Easy.


***


“What the fuck is this?”
Jim was glaring at the bags of rice.
“For the nachos,” Fat Steve said defensively.
Jim and Chang exchanged glances.  I looked away.  The next street over, a distinctive German engine stopped.  Our mark was here.
“Will someone tell him?” said Jim.  “Tell him what traditionally constitutes a nacho?”
Everyone looked at me.
“Good anger,” I said.  “Looks real.  Use it.”
I gave Chang the nod.  Our rides had to be running and ready to go.  We would be leaving in a hurry.
Footsteps were coming.  Expensive shoe leather.  Even their damn footsteps sounded rich.
Chang was gone.
I bent, tying a shoe that didn’t have laces.
I glanced back as the Mexican rounded the corner, flanked by two heavies.  They didn’t look so tough.  I’d had Maria fill their pistols with blanks that morning.  Good thing, having a girl on the inside.
Then my breath caught.
Ladybird.  His prized bulldog, solid, intimidating.  Looked like seventy pounds of pure muscle.
That was wrong.  The Mexican wasn’t meant to have Ladybird with him.
“Shit,” I muttered.  Too late to bow out now.
“You call this a fuckin’ burrito?” Jim roared.
Steve shoved, and then the Mexican was yanked back by one of his heavies (as planned) - and I swooped.
I was halfway across the street before they began to yell.
They gave a good chase, but I had scoped the area real good.  By the time I’d emerged on the rooftop opposite, they were looked bushed.  The fact they had offloaded a dozen rounds between them to no effect probably didn’t help.
“Catch!” I yelled, tossing the horse across the gap.  Fat Steve grabbed it, then I danced across the wire.  It was so thin I couldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been the one to lay it out.
It would’ve worked so easy, if it hadn’t been for that damned dog.
“Argh!”
The pain in my behind was like fire.
I fell.  The ground seemed very far below.  I scrabbled wildly, grabbing nothing at first…and then I was slamming into the side of the building, grasping desperately at the damned horse, as bags of rice sailed past my head, hitting the Mexican and his heavies down below.
The buzz of engines sounded.  The race was passing by above.
Time was nearly up.
Chang socked Ladybird with a bag of rice.  The dog barked as she fell, knocking the Mexican and his heavies like bowling pins.
Then I was limping over the roof and we were strapping in.  A moment later, the whole dusty city fell away like a bad dream…apart from the cop car.
Around us, the sky was full of microlights, buzzing through the air.  We had slipped amongst the race as planned.
There was only one problem.
The rocking horse was heavier than I had accounted for.  Already, my microlight was struggling, dipping below the others.  The cop car prowled after us like a hungry hyena.
“Crack it!” shouted Maria, zooming in from one side.  She was a real pro.  A real stunner.  My girl.
“What?” I demanded.  “The Mexican’ll kill us if we do that.  How are we supposed to ransom a cracked horse?”
Maria raised an eyebrow.  I knew better than to argue.
I twisted the horse’s wooden neck, and it sprung apart like a secret, revelling…
I reached in and pulled out the glittering things.
“Diamonds,” I breathed.
It was fair to say I was dumbstruck.
“Better than a ransom, right?” Maria told me.  She grinned.  “Heard him mention it to his driver.  That prized-childhood-toy bullshit was just cover.”
I stared at her a moment, then laughed wildly.
Then I shrugged and dropped the stupid rocking horse.
The microlight’s little engine whinnied with approval.
We streamed over the desert towards the setting sun.  I knew our luck would run out one day, but today…
From far below, there was a loud, distinctive thump as the rocking horse hit the cop car.  There was a screech of tyres, then the rapidly receding sound of impassioned swearing.
Today…well, today had worked out just about right.


The End

This story was written as an entry to the NYC Flash Fiction competition.  I had to write a story of 1k words, in the genre of crime caper, including a rocking horse, and using...well, you get the idea.  This was what resulted, something quite different to what I would come up with when given free reign.  It's not an amazing story, but I am fond of it, in a silly, slight sort of way...
If you like my writing, you can buy a badge of NFT-tastic support with one of these cheap-as-chips and common-as-muck digital items...

The Folk were thickly seeded in this corner of the forest, and whatever quality the two-legs looked for in their victims, Gull and the others seemed to have it.
One of the smaller two-legs slapped Lil excitedly with a soft, juicy meat-branch, and Gull could sense that the young tree was nearly wild with panic now.
Gull felt a stab of something then, a faint flicker that was almost pity.  It wasn’t fair.  Gull was something of a recluse amongst the Folk, and rarely joined in their yammering and games.  The young trees irked him, with their silliness and wild ideas.  They mocked him, too, though he pretended not to notice.  But however much he held himself apart from the others, and however much he was grateful that it wasn’t him being chosen, it was still a shame.
Gull has seen Lil grow, watching as she had sprouted one Spring, creeping up from the damp earth with eager, excited little twitches of vegetable movement.  Lil had been an impulsive, flighty sapling.  She made the other trees laugh, with her funny ideas and odd, childish fancies.
Now three of the two-legs were watching while the forth unslung the long silver tooth they always brought.  Gull has seen this done enough times before to know it was as good as over now.
Lil had been the unlucky one.  She had been chosen.  Not long now, and the sharp silver tooth would start cutting into her soft young bark.
The worst thing was, the two-legs wouldn’t even be able to hear Lil’s screams.  Whatever odd things their meaty minds could sense, it did not extend to being able to perceive anything the Folk said.  Not even when they screamed.
“No, don’t!” Pleaded Lil at last, breaking the tense silence which had hung over the forest.
It did no good, of course.  The silver tooth was soon sawing back and forth, biting deeper and deeper into Lil’s soft flesh.  She let out a high, desperate wail.
“Please!” She cried again.  “Please, please, please!”
Gull’s branches shook involuntarily. sending a tremor shimmering up, up, up, until every last pine needle seemed to quiver with the horror of it.
Why couldn’t Lil see that this wouldn’t do any good?  The Folk had their ways and rules, and chief amongst these was never to waste time or energy trying to talk to a two-legs.  It was worse than pointless.  If you fell under the spell of thinking they were rational, listening creatures, then what did that lead to?  Any creature that could see the terrible pain they inflicted, yet did so anyway...it didn’t bear thinking about.
Far away, as if from a great distance, Gull heard someone whispering something to him.  Something was tapping at the thick bark near the bottom of his trunk.
Gull floundered for the tapping, suddenly desperate for something, for any distraction to pull his attention away from Lil’s piteous screams.
It was a two-legs.  The smallest two-legs of the little group, so slight and young in fact that Gull hadn’t noticed it until now.  There was something odd about this one, though Gull couldn’t have said what exactly.  The way it stood, maybe; or perhaps something in the way it juddered its untethered roots, and flapped one of its meat-branches, a tight, controlled fluttering.
All of Gull’s pent up rage and fear and frustration abruptly had a focus, and his branches quivered with anger as he peered at the little creature.
“Oh, won’t you run away, you vile thing!” Gull told it.  “Aren’t you satisfied with the damage you’ve done us already?”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, of course.  Two-legs never responded to the Folk; to say anything to them was to waste your sap.
But to Gull’s enormous astonishment, the two-legs stopped tapping at once, and answered him.
“I said, can’t you make them stop?” Said the two-legs, and as it spoke, Gull realised that the two-legs had indeed said something of this sort, though Gull had been too distracted by Lil’s screams to pay much attention.
Gull wasn’t sure if he was more surprised by the fact the two-legs had spoken to him, or by the notion that he might be able to make the others stop.
“Me?” He finally managed.  “How could I possibly make them do that?”
“Well, you’re a grown-up, aren’t you?” Said the little two-legs, and Gull realised that the creature who was speaking to him must be a young one, a sapling.  He found it very difficult to distinguish between two-legs, but he supposed this one was rather small, even for the stunted, diminutive creatures.
“But...but you’re one of them,” Gull spluttered.  “How could I make them stop if you can’t?”
“They never listen to me,” said the two-legs.  Then it lifted its meat-branches up and rammed them to either side of the highest point of its trunk.  “Oh, please make them stop!  It’s so horrible!”
Lil’s wailing was indeed horrible, so loud and terrified that Gull was sure even Folk on the far side of the forest would be aware of it.
Part of Gull knew he shouldn’t be talking to the two-legs, knew that it was worse than pointless.  But he was answering almost before he had decided to, because a larger part of him wanted more than anything to stop Lil’s screaming; and despite everything, despite all his previous experience, he felt a sudden, desperate hope.
“Tell them to take me,” he said, then stopped short.
Where had that come from?
He should call that back.  He didn’t really mean that, he’d managed to get through those early, vulnerable winters; why would he try to undo that now?
“What?” Asked the two-legs.
But instead of calling the words back, Gull repeated them.
“Tell them to take me,” he said.
The two-legs were continuing to sink their silver tooth into Lil’s soft trunk.  They were maybe a third of the way through now; a grievous wound, but not too late.  Not quite.
“But...but won’t that just hurt you, instead?” Asked the small two-legs slowly.  “Won’t you scream just as loud?  I can’t stand the screaming.  No one else can hear it.  They all think I’m being silly, but I’m not!  I hate it.”
“I won’t scream,” Gull found himself promising.
“You won’t?” The two-legs asked.
“I’m the oldest here,” Gull went on, forcing the words out quickly before he could change his mind.  “I’ve seen the most.  I’m the most splendid.  There’s the most...the most honour in me.  Tell them that.”
The small two-legs looked at him silently for a moment.
“You?” It asked doubtfully.  “You’re a bit...well, big.  You wouldn’t fit in the house.”
That puzzled him, but he didn’t dwell on it.
“Just my top, then,” he told it urgently.  “Just take whatever bit of me would fit.”
The two-legs looked at him doubtfully for a moment, then said something to its fellows.  Gull couldn’t understand what the little two-legs was saying - in fact, it was only at this moment that he realised their previous conversation had not be out loud at all, but rather in some kind of internal dialogue that had flowed between them like water dripping between leaves.  But he got the impression that the small two-legs was indeed saying the group should take him instead of Lil.
They stopped sawing their horrible silver tooth back and forth, listening.  They seemed unmoved at first, and Gull felt a curious sensation, half utter relief, half crushing disappointment.
Then the little two-legs said something else, and the others seemed to reluctantly agree.  They stepped away from the quivering, terrified Lil, leaving sap pulsing gently from the cruel tear they had made in her bark.  Gull thought about changing his mind, about telling the small two-legs that he had been wrong, but it was too late for that.
He had made his choice.
The small creatures swarmed up his limbs, gripping onto him with their odd, hyper-mobile meat branches.  He saw the silver tooth glint in the cold moonlight, and barely had a moment to prepare for the pain before it was biting into him, cleaving through the ancient substances of his body.
All around him, others of the Folk watched as the the two-legs went to work on Gull.  He could sense revulsion in their regard, and terror that it might one day happen to them.  Yet he sensed something else too, something he had never before received from his kin in all the long years they had grown and thrived next to one another.
Respect.
Respect, and love.  For the choice he had made.  For the way he had re-directed the two-legs’ ire, saving Lil and dooming himself.
The tooth bit one last time, and the world tilted crazily around Gull as he came crashing down.  There was no pain anymore, just a spreading coldness from the place the tooth had cut him.
“Thank you,” he heard Lil whisper.  “I’ll remember you.  We all will.  Always.”
Gull felt the ground scratch under him as the two-legs grasped him, dragging him away from the lands he had known all his long life.
As the final darkness descended, as the last drops of life bled out of him, Gull heard the two-legs utter their odd, ritualistic refrain, that little incantation they made to one another every winter when they came to slay The Folk.
Listening to it now, Gull felt a strange peace come over him, and he heard those sinister words echo in the dim chambers of his own dying mind.  But they did not seem so sinister anymore; and as the last drop of life leeched from him, he repeated the incantation aloud in his own way, calling it out to the Folk - to his Folk, who he had sacrificed himself for, and whom he was now leaving forever - meaning it as a solemn promise and a final farewell, and a last message of love.
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” he said slowly.  “A very...merry...Christmas...”


The End

No trees were harmed during the making of this story.  I would sell it, but to save on paper you can instead buy one of three lovely limited-edition NFTs of this story with the specially-commissioned art by Diem / Khacclub_wj .  There's a strange little extra in the NFT version, too...

There is a unique NFT of this story embedded with the amazing commissioned artwork by Luca Granai knocking around here...Ludicrously expensive, of course...but then, who knows?  Perhaps it will appreciate...