​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...

Things fall apart.
In the Shire, the hobbits hold a referendum.
‘We refuse to be governed by stewards in Gondor who have never even been to the Westfarthing!  Tariffs on mushrooms are far beyond what any reasonable gaffer should expect to pay!’
In Narnia, the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea decides not to send his son, after all. Foreigners should fend for themselves.  He lets winter reign, instead.
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.  Yeats and Randal Flagg knew that.
In Wonderland, the cards are being sorted.  Red cards with red cards, black with black.  The vorpal sword is cutting the pack down the middle; that is how the vote came out.
It’s the same everywhere.
In Gormenghast, and in the Night Land; on Trantor and Terminus; Hy Brasil and Atlantis.
It’s the same everywhere.
It’s all very sad.  But what can you do?
The hobbits voted; and we did, too.

This little bit was written in response to Tom of Watt.  Shoot me a prompt, and I'll have fun trying to come up with something...

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


The End

Thanks for reading.  If you enjoyed, please consider reading another story, or (if you really enjoyed) you can support by buying a paperback or an NFT of a story! :)

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

After the age of oil and light, things collapsed.
Climate change, dwindling resources, an expanding population living ever more like rats, hemmed in and filthy.  Then came the second dark ages, which were long and terrible, and which Freya remembered, of course - for were the records not clear, as clear as crystals in her electronic banks?  But memory didn't quite do the sensation justice, because these 'memories' were four dimensional renderings only, reproduced from the scanty evidence of diaries and photographs, drawings and stories and songs.
Freya thought of these dark ages as flickerings from the time before her inception, for really she was born when the light returned, when civilisations spluttered up again - built on new energy, clever tricks of science - and the vast network that was her became linked for the first time, uniting all of humanity in one consciousness.
Then Freya came into awareness , and wept for the things she had done when she was many, for all the foolish, narrow choices.
But it was done.  Humanity - the joint consciousness of Freya, seething in looping codes and semi-organic mindstates of flesh interfacing with silicone - looked to the stars.
And the stars were much closer than they had been...

Ki looked at the thing he had made.  From his vantage point three rungs up the ladder of phase space, he could see it spread-eagled in nineteen dimensions.  It had spheres and lines, energetic colours, delicate curves that were beautiful in their endless inevitability.  It was pretty.
“Well, it’s not bad,” allowed Ola, grudgingly.  “I still prefer mine, though.”
The two pan-dimensional entities were comparing their attempts at substrates with which to fill lower Universes.  It passed eternity.
Ki regarded Ola’s most recent creation, and frowned. 
It was true: hers was certainly more elegant.
“I like the lights,” he muttered.  “Lights are a nice touch.”
“You think that’s good?” Ola replied, complacent in her victory.  “See what happens when I do this...”
Ola leaned into the little Universe, Phase Space telescoping around her as she gave it a flick, sending it rocketing along one further dimension: time.
The substrate flared brightly, much to Ki’s surprise, exploding in a kaleidoscopic panorama of colours, before dissipating gently into a barely perceptible hum of thin-spread background radiation.
“Well, good game,” sniffed Ola.  “We must play again.”
She stared at him, waiting for a response.  But Ki was too flabbergasted by what he had seen.  Time - in one of the lower realities!  Imagine that!   And the way her substrate had behaved, flaring then dissipating.  Why had it done that?  And what if it could be made to do something else?  The possibilities were...
And when he realised she had spoken to him, Ola was already gone, off to strut some higher rung of phase space, looking to win more contests.
Ki didn’t mind.  She had given him an idea...