Search Results for 'pick'

The phone rang while she was preparing her cabbage with soy sauce. It triggered a memory of a blue helmet. Quickly gone.
She hesitated a moment and stopped what she was doing to pick up the phone.
Her mother began speaking straight away.
“Where have you been all this time ? You’ll turn me mad. You’re so like your father, keeping to himself all those times when he was out playing mahjong with his friends. But I knew where that bastard was…”
Her voice was raspy after years of never being able to be speechless, and most astoundingly, she never repeated herself. The woman was even a sleeptalker. No wonder her husband would rather sneak out of the house to play with his friends.
Aqua Luna had developed an opposite habit, she would find her solace in silence and in doing house cleaning. But this time, the voice of her mother was fascinating. Something in it seemed different.

A blue flash interrupted her fascination. She almost jumped out of her pajamas.
“Listen carefully”, was saying the blue helmet.

Janet picked up the fallen crest and put it back on her head. “A cup of tea sounds great, but I think there’s a mouse in that teapot. Listen! There are scrabbling sounds inside, can you hear?”

“I wish I knew, Ed. And don’t call me Chicken!” she added crossly. Mari Fe wasn’t sure what to do next. She needed to keep an eye on Ed, but she needed to revive Baltazar and get him in place for the exchange of the Kings during the parade.

“Help me carry him up to the attic, Ed. I’ll tie him up and we can decide what to do with him later.” and then exclaimed, “ Oh lordy, what now!” as the doorbell rang. It was Rogelio from next door, the man who was to play the part of Baltazar in the parade.

Mari Fe didn’t know what to do so she hit him over the head with a handy tagine that was displayed on her old Micronesian teak cabinet.

“Firmly handled, Chicken”, Ed said, “But why on earth would you do that ?”

“Don’t call me Chicken!” Mari Fe replied, thinking to herself I really must stop resorting to violence. “Help me carry him up to the attic, and we’ll tie him up with B… with that man.”

Halfway up the stairs Mari Fe had an impulse to hit Ed over the head, with the detachable head of one of her mannequins. Plunging headlong from one disaster to another, she wished she had done it after the other two bodies were already in the attic. Now she had three large men cluttering up her stairs, and nobody to help her carry them up to the attic.

“I’m in a pickle now”, she said. “I hope Bee arrives soon, with Janet and Pearl.”

Terry was a bit confused by all these blinks in and out. He needed some cheese and decided to focus the multronic stream of his TTI (Time Travel Implant) to a fridge in the region called Spain.

Unfortunately, the flux went right through a mousehole and he didn’t quite get to Spain. He was in a dark room. Noises were muffled here and there was no smell he could recognize. Before doing anything foolish, he turned on his night vision and everything appeared with cartoonish colours and enhanced black edges. It was the only one available when he borrowed it from Dr Frankenlaughner’s lab. You got used to it, eventually.

The room was still dark, but a cartoonish dark. That was mysterious. A squirking sound, like an amazonian squirrel, startled him. His curiosity was picked. He took a piece of what was left of his Marie biscuit and began to walk as silently as he could toward the squirrel sound.

At approximately 11:11 Pearl heard a whoosh and a whoot, and then a loud thump. “Hop in, Pearl! toot! toot! Oh, and sorry about the porch swing, didn’t see it under all that snow” Bee was grinning from ear to ear. “First time I’ve used the snowmobile ski option, it’s a riot, haven’t quite got the hang of it yet though, but boy is it ever fun!”

Pearl laughed and hugged Bee. “It’s great to see you! I love your hat!” It was an elaborate blue turban, over the top with feathers and jewels. “Looks fabulous against all that snow, very delft. You know, you could have just used the portal to avoid all that snow! Janet!” Pearl spotted Janet in the back of the red car, who was picking herself up off the floor, and adjusting her pointy hat.

“But the journey was so much fun!” Janet said. “We bumped into Skolt, the travelling reindeer pee salesman, in Minnesota.”

“I hope you saved some for me!” replied Pearl. “I’ve got the moonshine, let’s party!”

Cornella had been enjoying the bamboo shoots until she found out about the dog leg broth they were cooked in. “Really, I can eat no more” she said unhappily, pushing away the bowl and glancing around the room. “What the devil is that?” she exclaimed as her eye fell on the tall dark mysterious cabinet. “Where did that come from?”

Lord and Lady Appleton glanced at each other. “I told you to be more careful, Jedward” whispered Mirabelle. “What’s that doing in here?”

“Oh, ha ha, why that’s just a little trinket I picked up in Long Poon, Cornella. It’s nothing, nothing at all.” Lord Appleton cleared his throat noisily. “Just an old cabinet, nothing really.”

“What’s inside?” asked Cornella, moving towards the dark wooden doors. “What an interesting insignia, it reminds me of something.”

“Don’t open it!” shreiked the Appletons. “It’s, er, full of dog legs.”

Cornella frowned, wondering why dog legs kept popping up.

She was right. Maybe he needed a job as a janitor instead, and draw on walls, or write some sotteries pardon my Medieval French.
“I’m leaning towards valuing the imagination parts of me.” he’d answered, not quite convinced, as though it were told by someone else, or something he’d read earlier somewhere, on a wall probably.
The vole was still there when she’d left. She’d kept moving back to give it space to run off up the dry road, but no, the little thing even held its hand up when she tried to pick it up as if to say NO! thank you I’m fine.
He too was fine, surrounded by converging ripples of emotions, but oddly calm.
“Too neatly organized stuff gets dusty and boring” he’d said to her.
“I know,” she’d answered, ending their brief encounter with a limerick

The housekeeping lady of China,
Said she’d never seen anything finer,
than a wacom of dust,
that she sponged and brushed,
that housekeeping lady of China…

Petronella had attended many “Occupy Movement” gatherings- she was one of the first to shuffle eagerly to Wall Street when the Yankee Americans were finally awakened from their stupendous slumber, and when the Spanish were shouting “Viva la Revolucion!” she was silently there, capturing every movement with her Canon IX-25 14.0 Megapixel camcorder and reporting to the rest of the world the rumblings of the impending revolution. This occupation was different, felt different, and conducted in a different manner.

She dusted the dirt off the book, looked around to see if nobody spotted her picking the book up, and retreated back into her tent. She brew a fresh pot of coffee, bundled herself in her tiny, yet thick and warm blanket and set the book before her. It was an odd-looking book, none like the books she’d encountered- and she encountered many books! Its cover was plain, covered in a velvet cloth with the title written plainly and boldly on the cover: CANARIA. The name rang a distant bell, but she shook the afterthought and proceeded to open the book. As she opened the first page, another beam of bright energetic light- this time it was blue- swept past her like a hurried flock of bees. This was the fourth beam of light she’d witnessed in the past twelve hours, and she was beginning to think she was going crazy. What made the whole matter even more crazier was that these beams of light seemed to be WHISPERING AND GIGGLING, almost as though they were forlorn inhabitants of the vatican. She ignored the beam of light- yet again- and resumed with her book. Just then, a blip sounded from her tiny Lenovo notebook: Kerry had sent her an instant message on Facebook chat. Slightly chagrined, she leered over and grabbed her notebook, settling the book next to her. Kerry was offline, but she had left a link to a website. Petronella clicked onto the link, and an article popped up on the screen. She skimmed by, having little interest in Kerry’s New Age nonsense. She was just about to close the webpage when a sentence caught her attention: “When you practise remote viewing, you will be accorded a beam of light with its owwn colour that’ll identify with you.”
The mentioned beams of light the sentence mentioned were the same she’d been witnessing, so she silently read on.

Shelly Dwelling, horrifed ~ naturally enough ~ at the mention of butter and parsley, was immensely relieved to see Frobisher the frog gliding along in his electric wheelchair. “Hop on, Shelly!” he whispered urgently “My wheelchair is super fast, I’ll get you out of this pickle in a jiffy!”

“Frobisher! Oh my godfrogs, it’s good to see you! What timing! But I can’t hop!”

“Well neither can I now, without my legs” he replied, “But you can climb up my wheel, can’t you?”

“Well ok, but don’t move, I’m on my way, this may take a while…”

“Hurry, Shelly! Hurry up! I can smell butter melting, there’s no time to lose!”

Unfortunately for Shelly who was a quarter of the way up the left wheel, Frobisher engaged his electric motor and sped off into the long grass. It would have been far too risky to wait.

“Hang on, Shelly! This will be the ride of your life!” he called, as Shelly spun round the giant Ferris Wheel.

“I suppose this is why your name is Frobisher Ferris” she replied through gritted teeth.

Alfred, the clockwork Murganian, suddenly remembered he had an overdue library book.

He picked up the dusty book from the oven, took off his coat, rolled to the door and pulled a key from his shoe to let himself out. It was such a very long time since he had been out and he was most surprised to find that the seeds he had planted in the sky some time ago had grown to such an extent that his pathway was no longer accessible.

What to do? wondered Alfred. He wondered for a few minutes then realised that wondering was getting him nowhere and action was called for.

“Help” he shouted.

{link – key}

It was hot, although not as hot as usual for the month of August on the southern slopes of the Serrania de Ronda. It had rained, the black clouds and thunder a welcome respite from the searing dry heat of an Andalucian summer, plumping up the blackberries and washing the dust from the leaves of the fig trees. Blithe Gambol hadn’t seen her old friend Granny Mosca for months, although she wasn’t quite sure what had kept her from visiting for so long. Blithe loved Granny Mosca’s cottage tucked away in the saddle behind the fat hill and there had been times when she’d visited often, just to drink in the magical air and feast her eyes on the beauty of the surroundings. Dry golden weeds scratched her legs as she made her way along the dirt path, and she was mindful of the fat black snake she’d once seen basking on the stone walls as she reached into the brambles to pluck blackberries and take photographs.

Rounding a corner in the path she gasped at the incongrous and alarming sight of a bright yellow bulldozer just meters from Granny Mosca’s cottage. The bulldozer was flattening a large area of prickly pear cactuses. Unfortunately for the cactuses, it was fruiting time, and Blithe wondered if Granny Mosca had first picked the fruits and suspected that she had, those that she could reach. Nothing that could be eaten was left unpicked ~ Blithe remembered the many sacks of almonds that Granny had given her over the years, very few of which she had bothered to shell and eat.

The bulldozer was making an entranceway to the tiny derelict cottage that was situated next to Granny Mosca’s house. Granny had asked Blithe if she wanted to buy it, and she had wanted to buy it eventually, but the purchase of a derelict building hadn’t been a priority at the time. Now it looked as if she was too late, that someone else had bought it, perhaps to use as a holiday home. Horrified, Blithe called out for Granny, who was often in the goat shed or away across the hidden saddle valley cutting weeds to feed the poultry, but there was no sign of her. Two alien looking turkeys gobbled in response, and the black and white chained dog barked menacingly.

As Blithe retraced her steps along the dirt path it occured to her that whoever was planning to use the derelict cottage might be a very interesting person, someone she might be very pleased to make the acquaintance of in due course. After all, she had noticed that the holiday guests staying at the casitas on the other side of the fat hill were all sympathetic to the magical nature of the location, many of them arriving from a previous visit to a particularly interesting location in the Alpujarras ~ a convergence of ley lines. When questioned as to why they chose the fat hill casitas, they simply said they liked the countryside. Either they weren’t telling, or they were simply unaware objectively of the connection of the locations. Blithe could sense the connections though, both the locations, and that the people choosing to vacation at the fat hill were connected to it.

For one hundred and forty seven thousand years, Blithe had had an energy presence at the fat hill, although it was half a century of her current focus before she remembered it. She had felt protective of it, when she finally remembered it, as if she had a kind of responsibility to it. This place can look after itself quite well on its own, she reminded herself. The fat hill had watched while Franco’s Capitan looted the Roman relics, and watched as Blithe stumbled upon the remains of Roman and Iberian cities, and the fat hill had laughed when Blithe first tried to find the entrance to the interior and got stuck in thorn bushes. Later, the fat hill had smiled benignly when Granny Mosca led her to the entrance ~ without a thorn bush in sight. The cave entrance had been blocked with boulders then. Blithe had given some thought to an excavation, wondering how to achieve it without attracting the attention of the locals, but now she wondered if one day, when the time was right, she would find the entrance clear, as if by magic. Magic, after all, was by no means impossible.

{link: feast for the birds}

Dear OW’s and Favourite Daughter,

I had a dream last night. It went like this . . . . I was in the garden when I noticed an alien space ship coming down from a great height above me. It was humming, humm, hummm, humming. Like that. There was a smell of old cabbages and kitty litter.

It landed a few feet away from me. It was like a saucer and coloured olive green. A door opened on the underside and a ladder lowered. The ladder was made of wood, which surprised me. The aliens started down the ladder. They had no arms or legs. Just heads. They came down the ladder using their lips.

There were eight of them. The leader (at least I took it to be their leader as he had the biggest head) approached me. He said “Where can we get some hats ?”

Next thing I remember I was in the back of a pickup truck eating a prawn cocktail. Next to me sitting on some old sacks was the head alien slurping down uncooked carrots direct from the tin.

He said to me “We would like you to make a tv commercial for us”.

Then I woke up.

I’m afraid to report this encounter with the third kind to the authorities in case they just laugh at me.

I need your advice on this one. What should I do ?

Uncle Garnet