Search Results for 'ease'

Connie excused herself from an after dinner drink with Supposedly Sweet Sophie, pleading indigestion from the sour berries in the reindeer stew. It was only half a lie: she did feel sour, but she didn’t know why. Locking the hotel bedroom door behind her, she leaned on it and let out a long sigh. Being annoyed all the time was starting to get so annoying.

In an attempt to lighten her mood and release some pent up energy, she found an exercise video and pressed play. When she saw the fitness instructor using weights on her ankles she had an idea. Scanning the room, she noticed a pair of matching concrete buddhas either side of the balcony doors. Perfect! Connie thought, and with gritted teeth strapped one to each ankle with a couple of brassieres. Now when I take them off, I’ll feel the impossible lightness of being.

In the fashion section of Rim of the Realm, Connie “Continuity” Brown was weaving the latest reports together.
An unsavoury trend was gaining momentum in the meat factories to increase productivity: workers were wearing nappies to save wasting time visiting the lavatory.

The trend was spreading to banks and offices, where high heels and codpieces were required, causing a spate of unusual injuries and accidents, especially since the equality laws came into force, requiring both men and women to wear both high heels and codpieces ~ and nappies, due to the removal of time wasting unproductive lavatories worldwide.

Dispersee sat on a fallen tree trunk, lost in thought. A long walk in the woods had seemed just the ticket to release her from her turbulent thoughts, but alas, she had been unable to stop thinking about the ramifications of the new message from the popular ghost.

At first she had been delighted to see it. She had agreed with it. But then she wondered why. Because she already knew all this, and in fact, it was information that could so readily be gleaned by anyone at all simply by engaging ordinary common sense, and run of the mill human compassion. Nothing esoteric was needed. No enlightened messages from the great beyond. In fact, she had said the same as the ghost, and on many occasions. The truth of the matter was that one had to be dead these days to be heard. Nobody was interested in the wise words of the living anymore. It could almost be said that nobody was all that interested in living at all: everyone wanted to be in the future, or the past, or in some other dimension, or planet, or not even physically alive at all anywhere. The individuals in the ascension process were particularly infected with this strange disorder: many of the ordinary uninitiated public were already quite well aware of the contents of the message and were already actively engaged in the process. It was as if the interest in so called shifty matters was an obstacle, an ugly carbuncle over the heart.

Dispersee seriously wondered if the whole shift thing had been a good idea. She was beginning to doubt that it was. The alacrity with which people relied on messages from ghosts at the expense of exercising their own powers of deduction and intuition had caused the whole plan to do disastrously wrong. People didn’t even know how to behave like people anymore. Not only were they afraid of other people, afraid of their governments, afraid of their food, of the sun and the water and the very earth itself, they were afraid of their own human responses, or had forgotten them altogether.

Did it really need a ghost to advise people on media propaganda, and remind them to be compassionate to others who were on an incredible journey, an extraordinary movement during these times of change? And more to the point, did Dispersee need to be involved at all in this futile ascension malarkey?

Then she collapse, her body rigid like stone. Actually her skin began to take on a shade of grey, and several colonies of moss found their way into the wrinkles and meanders of the granite like hair.
Mater arrived at that moment.
“Oh! my! Dido, what did you do ?”
The old lady looked at the table, saw the empty jar, the lines of ants already pillaging the sweet spots on the table and on Idle’s fingers. Some of them had already turned into stone. Mater tried to forage into the jar to find the small package. It contained the mantra to release the hungry ghost from the stone trap of the termite honey.
The jar was meant for rats, Mater would feed them with termite honey to change them into stone and sell them on the market. A little hobby. She would never have thought Idle would eat that stuff. It smelled quite awful.

“Now then, you lot! Where were we?” cried Aunt Idle. “Everyone, back on the right thread, if you please! No cackling!”

But Idle was quite alone. Her words echoed off the walls forlornly. There were no characters here anymore ~ it was a ghost town.

But wait! What is this?

Her greedy fingers had located something unexpected; something dense and uncompromising was lurking in her precious nectar. Carefully, she explored the edges of the object with her finger tips and then tugged. The object obligingly emerged, a gooey gelatinous blob.

Dido sponged off the honey allowing it to plunk on to the table top. It did not occur to her to clean it up. Indeed, she felt a wave of defiant pleasure.

The ants will love that, although I guess Mater won’t be so thrilled. Fussy old bat.

She licked her fingers then transferred her attention back to the job at hand. After a moment of indecision whilst her slightly disordered mind flicked through various possibilities, she managed to identify the object as a small plastic package secured with tape. Excited, and her ravenous hunger cravings temporarily stilled in the thrill of the moment, she began to pick at the edges of the tape.

Cocooned Inside the plastic was a piece of paper folded multiple times. Released from its plicature, the wrinkled and dog-eared paper revealed the following type written words:

food self herself next face write water truth religious behind mince salt words soon yourself hope nature keep wrong wonder noticed.

“Godfrey, what on earth are you mumbling about now, while that man is running around the grounds with a rubber duck in his hands! Please do focus on the matter at hand! He’s stumbled into the wrong thread, surely?”

Elizabeth wrung her hands. “The characters are all running amok!”

The Roberto story had been finished long ago ~ or had it?

Finnley would know. But where was she?

“Godfrey will deal with them, Finnley,” replied Liz. “Please don’t bother me when I’m up to my elbows in latex.”

The new range of life sized Shift Leader Personalities was almost ready for the first pour. Sam had constructed an innovative vibrating table for Liz’s project, using household vibrating tools, and old tyre and a wide plank. She was truly grateful for the new apparatus to reduce the detrimental effect of individual bubbles appearing in the finished products. There was a time and place for bubbles, and concrete wasn’t one of them.

“They want to see you, though,” said Finnley, returning after a short consultation with the guests.

“Well show them in, then,” replied Liz, who had an idea brewing. “Maybe I can cast their body parts into something useful.”

“What is the name of your father ?”
“My father ?”
“Yes, your new father”, said the man. “We offer the possibility for you to choose your parents. That’s a rare thing in life, you know. I think that’s why the new world has so much appeal. People are just tired of the lack of control in their life.”
“And can you change if you get bored by your new parents ?”
“You can do it twice, after which the choice is definitive.”
“That’s an illusion of control, then.”
“Well… People just quickly get into their new role and they forget that they had the choice. Most of them don’t even use their first possibility.”
“Do I have to choose among parents that already exist in the new world?”
The man looked annoyed. He put his big hands on the table. Sam looked at them fascinated.
“You can choose whatever parents you want. If they don’t exist in the new world, you can then choose if they are deceased or just in vacation outside of the new world. In which case whenever someone matching your parents description apply for the new world, we can arrange for a poignant family reunion.”
“I just have a last question”, said Sam.
“Ok, make it a quick one. Other people are desirous to start a new life in the new world, you know.”
“Yes, I know. But still, I wonder if the persons who apply for an identity that matches my new parents. I can see in your file that you never ask their date of birth. They couldnt be younger than me, could they ?”
The man scratched his head with his left hand. Sam wondered what it was like to have such huge hands.
“Theoretically, that could happen. But you know, we offer you a new life in the new world, not a perfect life in a perfect world.”

Becky sat looking at the key in her hand long after the others had gone to bed, her mind going over seemingly disjointed images and random memories, trying to piece them all together. Why had Dory sent her, Becky, the key to the detention camp? She wasn’t expected to fly to the island and physically release the detainee’s surely? Should she send it to someone in the area? But who? Or was it more symbolic? But symbolic of what, exactly?

Was it connected to the Imagination Wave? It surely must be, she thought. It must be connected to the surge of story character refugees, looking for a new story.

Becky sighed. There had been such a dearth of imagination during the previous waves that literally countless story refugees had been rounded up and detained, with no new stories available anywhere on the planet. Of course this wasn’t actually true: there were always countless new stories to be told, but the lack of imagination, the sheer lack of will to tell them, had brought the global situation to a dreadful impasse.

We could write them all out of the stories with a rat tat tat of the keyboards, she mused, and immediately cringed at the idea. Any fool can destroy in seconds. Destruction isn’t power, creation is.

Was it a coincidence that the leader of the old story where most of the characters were fleeing from, had the same name as that alien that kept promising to land, but never actually did?

Shaking her head, Becky wondered, not for the first time, if the world population can’t handle a few displaced story characters, what in Glods name would be the reaction to a load of aliens? Still clutching the blue key, Becky went to bed. She would discuss it with the others in the morning.

Penelope and Patty Ratty had packed their bags, procuring the necessary items from Bea’s cluttered house. Candles (it was always so dark behind fridges), bar of soap (some of these human houses were not all that clean, a self respecting rat felt quite filthy after a midnight stroll around some kitchens and needed a good wash afterwards), mince pies, used teabags to use as in flight pillows, and an unexpected prize of a half an antibiotic tablet, thoughtfully left out in a convenient position. Patty often got an upset stomach when travelling in human spaces, and was inordinately pleased to find the pill.

“Sorry to bother you again, Ed.”

This was a lie; Evangeline wasn’t at all sorry. There was nothing she loved better than to be the bearer of bad news and she was rather pleased to have an excuse to call Ed Steam so soon after their last conversation.

“The Cackle Insanitization Committee contacted me. Their spies reported that Gustave had a meeting with that awful whinging Bea woman from Cackletown.”

Ed was shocked. “Gustave? Gustave Butterworth, the scientist? He’s supposed to be working for us, isn’t he?”

Evangeline sniffed dismissively, eager to pass on her next tantalising morsel. She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice and sound appropriately serious.

“The other concerning thing is that the Contumacious Cackler is in town. There have been several verified hearings of him.”

“The Contumacious Cackler!” Ed’s horrified reaction was music to Evangeline’s ears, although she was not entirely sure who the Contumacious Cackler was or why the mention of his name elicited such horror. She decided to ask.

“It’s rather a sad story. His mother ran away from home when he was just 3 years old, due to his father’s incessant cackling. The Contumacious Cackler never saw his mother again and he grew up with an obsessive hatred of cackling. He vowed to put an end to cackling. He cackles so evilly that he stirs up trouble wherever he goes. His dastardly plan is to create so much resistance to cackling that the people are inflamed sufficiently to rise up against cacklers. He is reported to be responsible for the demise of cackling in 2 of the provinces.”

Gustave jumped when the phone rang, his heart hammering unpleasantly. Get a grip! he told himself sternly. Hesitantly he answered the call, expecting to hear an ear grating cackle.

“Can I speak to Leonora, please? It’s Bea here,” the voice requested.

“Er, sorry, I think you have the wrong number,” replied Gustave, feeling like a fool as he tried to calm his shaking hands.

“Leonora Butterworth?” insisted the voice calling herself Bea.

Startled, he said “Ah, Butterworth’s the name, but I’m afraid I don’t know anyone called Leonora,” and then, astonished, he heard Bea start to sob and mumble incoherently.

“I’m so sorry, was it urgent?” he asked, already feeling a responsibility to help the unknown woman. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“It’s the cackling,” Bea answered with a sniff, “It’s driving me mad. I thought a chat with Leo might help take my mind off it, but I haven’t seen her since the fiasco in Spain and I don’t know where she is, I was hoping this Butterworth number would be her and…..” her voice trailed off disconsolately.

“It’s driving me mad too,” Gustave was surprised to hear himself say. “I say, er, Bea,” he cleared his throat, “Would you fancy meeting for a drink in the Spotted Dick Inn? To, you know, take our minds off it?”

Gustave had regained his scientific composure somewhat, and was considering the benefits of an unexpected opportunity to research the effects of the cackling on the ordinary population.

Bea readily agreed, old tart that she was, and said she would be there in half an hour.