Search Results for 'stop'

“Saddle Felicity’s dragon, Finnley, and Saddle Godfrey’s too. Felicity might need a spare. And stop gaping at me!” Elizabeth continued to beam magnanimously at her little treasure, the cleaning lady.

“Godfrey’s been experimenting with his hallucinogenic botanicals again,” she added, lowering her voice. “He probably won’t notice, or else he’ll just think it’s his mind playing tricks on him again.”

“You’ve been wanting to get rid of those dragons ever since we started, haven’t you?” asked Finnley. She didn’t need an answer, she knew it was true.

“You look like the cat who got the cream,” she said to Liz.

“You’re not leaving here without taking your dragon! You can’t leave it here!” Elizabeth shouted. “You! You there, handsome gardener man! Stop that woman climbing over the fence!”

Elizabeth glared at Godfrey again. “I’m not sure you can be trusted to saddle up her dragon, frankly. Finnley! Where is that dratted maid? Finnley!”

Bea ordered a cup of coffee, and twinkled her eyes at the nice looking young waiter. She twinkled out of habit, as it had been a good many months since she had felt twinkly. She wondered, not for the first time, if it was the onset of pre senile dementia, or just a momentary madness. The truth of the matter was, she had no idea what she was doing there, but had a nagging feeling that she was there to do SOMETHING. The word Witless kept popping into her head. Protection of the Witless or something…wandering while whimsically wending ones willowy way…was it about woods? Enchanted woods?

She bit into the doughnut and the custard filling gushed forth, filling her mouth with it’s cool creaminess. Custard. Custard. She stopped chewing, lost in thought, the custard dribbling down her chin unchecked.

“Poor old Mum,” repeated Sara who had entered the room behind her twin. “That’s awful. But anyway, there is something we have to tell you.” She looked at Steve and he nodded, encouraging her to continue. John looked at them both guiltily.

“If it is that Steve is really a girl, I know that. I’ve known for years, of course. But your Mum did want a boy so badly … the pretence just got out of hand and we started believing it ourselves. Sorry about that.”

“No worries, Dad,” said Steve, (who from this point on was known as ‘Stevie’). “It will be a relief to stop pretending though. It’s a bit awkward sometimes … no, that isn’t it. The thing is ….”

“Stevie and I are going to Australia,” broke in Sara. “You know, where Clove comes from. We’ve decided to go and stay at the Flying Fish Inn.”

Liz perused the “jobs wanted” notices without much enthusiasm. It really was quite tedious with no staff around, and nobody to talk to. The thought of training new staff, was rather off putting, but the interviewing could be fun. Or perhaps a holiday, somewhere exotic.

“I know!” she exclaimed out loud, “I’ll go to Peasland!”

Suddenly a crash sounded from the cellar below. A muffled voice bellowed, “Somebody stop her!”

Corrie’s findings from elsewhere:

“Mike wasn’t as courageous as his former self, the Baron. That new name had a cowardly undertone which wasn’t as enticing to craze and bravery as “The Baron”.

The idea of the looming limbo which had swallowed the man whole, and having to care for a little girl who surely shouldn’t be out there on her own at such an early hour of the day spelt in unequivocal letters “T-R-O-U-B-B-L-E” — ah, and that he was barely literate wasn’t an improvement on the character either.

Mike didn’t want to think to much. He could remember a past, maybe even a future, and be bound by them. As well, he probably had a family, and the mere though of it would be enough to conjure up a boring wife named Tina, and six or seven… he had to stop now. Self introspection wasn’t good for him, he would get lost in it in quicker and surer ways than if he’d run into that Limbo.

“Let me tell you something… Prune?… Prune is it?”
“I stop you right there, mister, we don’t have time for the “shouldn’t be here on your own” talk, there is a man to catch, and maybe more where he hides.”

“Little girl, this is not my battle, I know a lost cause when I see one. You look exhausted, and I told my wife I would be back with her bloody croissants before she wakes up. You can’t imagine the dragon she becomes if she doesn’t get her croissants and coffee when she wakes up. My pick-up is over there, I can offer you a lift.”

Prune made a frown and a annoyed pout. At her age, she surely should know better than pout. The thought of the dragon-wife made her smile though, she sounded just like Mater when she was out of vegemite and toasts.

Prune started to have a sense of when characters appearing in her life were just plot devices conjured out of thin air. Mike had potential, but somehow had just folded back into a self-imposed routine, and had become just a part of the story background. She’d better let him go until just finds a real character. She could start by doing a stake-out next to the strange glowing building near the frontier.

“It’s OK mister, you go back to your wife, I’ll wait a little longer at the border. Something tells me this story just got started.”

“Aunt Idle was craving for sweets again. She tip toed in the kitchen, she didn’t want to hear another lecture from Mater. It only took time from her indulging in her attachments. Her new yogiguru Togurt had told the flockus group that they had to indulge more. And she was determined to do so.
The kitchen was empty. A draft of cold air brushed her neck, or was it her neck brushing against the tiny molecules of R. She cackled inwardly, which almost made her choke on her breath. That was surely a strange experience, choking on something without substance. A first for her, if you know what I mean.

The shelves were closed with simple locks. She snorted. Mater would need more than that to put a stop to Idle’s cravings. She had watched a video on Wootube recently about how to unlock a lock. She would need pins. She rummaged through her dreadlocks, she was sure she had forgotten one or two in there when she began to forge the dreads. Very practicle for smuggling things.

It took her longer than she had thought, only increasing her craving for sweets.
There was only one jar. Certainly honey. Idle took the jar and turned it to see the sticker. It was written Termite Honey, Becky’s Farm in Mater’s ornate writing. Idle opened the jar. Essence of sweetness reached her nose and made her drool. She plunged her fingers into the white thick substance.”

“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.”

““What a load of rubbish!” Idle exclaimed, disappointed that it wasn’t a more poetic message. She screwed up the scrap of crumpled paper, rolled it in the honey on the table, and threw it at the ceiling. It stuck, in the same way that cooked spaghetti sticks to the ceiling when you throw it to see if it’s done. She refocused on the honey and her hunger for sweetness, and sank her fingers back into the jar.”

“The paper fell from the ceiling on to Dido’s head. She was too busy stuffing herself full of honey to notice. In fact it was days before anyone noticed.”

“The honeyed ball of words had dislodged numerous strands of dried spaghetti, which nestled amongst Aunt Idle’s dreadlocks rather attractively, with the paper ball looking like a little hair bun.”

““Oh my god …. gross!“ cackled the cautacious Cackler.”

““Right, that does it! I’m moving the whole family back to the right story!” said Aunt Idle, invigorated and emboldened with the sweet energy of the honey. “Bloody cackling nonsense!””

Corrie:

Sometimes I wish I’d never started this, but somehow I can’t stop. It’s daunting, with bits of the story here, there and everywhere (and sometimes, nowhere). A bit like starting a huge jigsaw puzzle when you wonder where to begin, or what even is the point. But then all it takes it that little flutter when two pieces fit together to spur you on to find the next.

When I’d chanced upon Aunt Idle’s private blog, coincidentally on the same day that I’d found mater’s old paper spiral notebook with that loopy old fashioned writing, I had an idea to put together a story, the story of the flying fish inn. Because there was something funny going on here, and I wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt like the story wasn’t over yet. So some of the pieces were nowhere yet, obviously, but many had fallen elsewhere, for various reasons.

Sophie looked dubiously at the shampoo bottle. It was smaller than the ones she was used to in the US, and It was written kókosolía. She had no idea what it meant but the picture underneath looked vaguely like two big coconuts.

She opened it, pressed the bottle to smell what was inside, then poured a bit of the white substance into her palm. No doubt there was coconut inside. She touched it. It was very oily. Maybe it was not shampoo after all. She looked at the other bottles. None smelled as good as the first one. She decided to give it a try.

After her shower she felt rejuvenated. It was like the old times, with her husband Bob they used to travel a lot and stay in all kinds of hotel. She always loved that moment when she was drying her hair and Bob would sneak in behind her and take her into his arms. She sighed. Nope, that would not happen today.

She almost jumped when she realized her hair was inflating. She had very thin hair usually and they were rather close to her head, but today it looked like they had a new life. She wondered if it would deflate as soon as she’d stop the hot hair. She hesitated but it looked almost done. She turned off the power and the hair stayed up.

She heard a knock at the door. She wondered who that could be.

“Sophie. It’s me”, said Connie’s voice.
“A moment said Sophie.” She put her old clothes on. She didn’t take much with her in her suitcase, she didn’t have enough room for clothes with all her apparatus. She checked her hair one last time, still up. Then she opened the door.

They looked at each other and said at the same time : “Oh! You used the coconut shampoo too.”
“Let’s have diner”, said Connie. “As for the hair, I bumped into other guests, and the ladies all seem to have the beehive haircut.”

situation talking
certain food
themselves short paper comment
nor missed island night self stopped working
lead concrete character help thinking ask

View (yes, his name is “View”) exited his building and before he had a chance to see anything else in the world, there in front of him, plopped down in the middle of the street with a piece of paper and charcoal, was a little boy, apparently doing a rubbing of the pavement.

View was immediately curious.

“So, what are you doing, exactly?”

The boy, slightly disgruntled, stopped what he was doing and looked up at View.

“Well that’s an obsurd question. You’d think it was obvious. I’m creating a map.”

“A map?!” View said, “How’s that? I don’t get it.”

The boy turned back to his rubbing, filled the page, set another down right beside it and began rubbing again.

“It’s the greatest map of it’s kind, exquisitely drawn up in perfect 1:1 scale.”

John placed himself down on a crooked old chair at the table, with journal in hand, and stared out the window of his cottage. As he sat there, the imperfect glass of the window distorted his view slightly, but noticeably, almost unconsciously, and he swayed in minuscule displacements or perhaps shifted a bit to take a sip of his black coffee, giving the effect of a liquid world – to someone of imagination, of course. To those with no imagination, the window was rubbish and needed to be replaced.

It’s been a relaxing weekend for John, who, on his working days, finds himself as a writer. This is, of course, if you were to think of any days as those in which you might suddenly stop writing or ignore inspiration. In that respect, every day is a working day. However, this weekend was a special one for himself.

The writing that got him money was of the technical sort, dedicated to dry manuals and instructional fare. His passion, however, lent itself to the imagination. No doubt, he still adored the natural world and it’s workings, but he found himself nearly dead inside after completing a project for work. This, invariably, lead him to his personal expeditions.

Every few weeks he’d save up enough money to take a train or bus to another location, picked nearly at random, just so he could get away and bring color back into his life. This cottage, with its imperfect windows, was one such expedition.

So, he sat there for a moment, playing with his perception through the window, and then shifted his attention through it to world outside. A breath of beauty swept over him and he was inspired. In his journal, with no expectation of the entry living beyond those pages, he wrote:

The Wystlewynds (Whistle Winds) or Wystlewynd Forest

The Wystlewynds (Whistle Winds) or Wystlewynd Forest is a forested, mountainous area – if you’re apt to call these green, low laying perturbations in the Earth “mountains”. The cool-yet-comfortable south-easterly winds blow through the Wystlewood trees, whistling as it goes. Some would say the forest sings.

Wystlewood trees “sing”, as it were, due to the way the wind passes through their decomposing trunks. While alive, the trunks of the trees have a hard, fibrous outer wood, while the inner portion is soft and sponge-like, saturated in chemical that simultaneously grabs on to water and repels insects. When the trees get old and begin to die off, they tend to remain upright for some time as the inner sponge decomposes. This leaves a hollow void where a particular caterpillar takes refuge, unaffected by the repellent chemical that a fungus slowly decomposes into an edible source of nutrition.

These caterpillars leave behind a secretion that the decomposing fungus in the tree requires. The relationship between the caterpillar and fungus is symbiotic in that regard, both feeding each other. We call these caterpillars “Woodworms”.

When the caterpillars are ready to cocoon, they climb out to one of the old branches and hang themselves from a cord of twisted threads at least a foot long. When they are ready to come out, they bite through the cord, dropping themselves to the forest floor while still in the cocoon. The cocoon and all drops below the foliage of the undergrowth, where the moth can come out into the world under cover of green leaves and the shimmering violet flowers of the Spirit Flower – a color scheme that the moth shares.

The Spirit Flower is a rhizome with a sprawling root structure that tends to poke it’s way into everything. It has small violet shimmering flowers in umbels that in any other case might be white. The leaves are simple with a jagged margin, alternating. The stem is on the shorter end, perhaps a foot tall, fibrous and slightly prickly.

There are a few flowers that tend to dominate the undergrowth, Spirit Flowers being one. Sun Drops and Red Rolls are additional examples, the former a yellow droopy flower and the latter a peculiar red flower with a single pedal that’s rolled up in a certain way that would suggest a flared funnel with wavy edges.

The flowers and trees enjoy the soil here, a bit sandy and rocky, but mixed with a richness created by the mixture of undergrowth, fungi and bacteria. The roots dig into the soil, slowly stirring it and adding to it’s nutrients. The fungi eat the dead roots and fallen foliage and the bacteria eat the fungi and everything else, of course.

The whole matter leaves a note of scent in the air that cannot be described as anything other than that of the Wystlewynds. It’s perhaps sweet, with Earthy undertones and an addictive bitterness. The whole place seems to elevate one’s energy, sharpening the senses. You want to sing with the trees, or perhaps play along with a haelio (a flute-like instrument created with wystlewood).

The woman sitting next to me on the plane never stopped talking, she must have told me her whole life story, Aunt Idle wrote in her diary. It was a long flight from Australia to Iceland, I’m not complaining ~ it was quite an entertaining story. She said she came from Blue Lagoon campsite in the Adirondacks originally, although that was many moons ago, as she put it. Then she joined the army, but she didn’t tell me much about that, only that she’d been posted to Kenya and had taken to the place, always meant to go back and never did. She’s been married twice, once to a northerner called Bert Wagstaff, but that didn’t last long ~ nice enough guy, she said, but a bit boring. No kids. Then to Trudell. That was another story she said, but didn’t elaborate.

She said something about investigating fungus but the drinks trolley appeared. She asked for Blue Sapphire gin but they only had Gordon’s, and then she started going on about when she was in India. She had a book in her hands the whole flight, although she didn’t stop talking long enough to read much, it was The Rabbit, by Peter Day, with a picture of an upright man with a rabbit head on the cover, all in white, rather surreal.

Connie couldn’t stop thinking about that odd but intriguing man she’d interviewed who’d almost been crushed under a wheel of gouda. Possibly rescuing the worm from under the doormat was connected, or at least, had served as a reminder to her to think of an excuse to contact him again. His cat like agility was most appealing. As was his codpiece.

Dispersee couldn’t stop thinking about the carbonite, feeling that there must be more to it than just a master tricksters method to slim down the graduate class. She wasn’t even all that surprised when, within moments of research, she had chanced upon the Villa Poppacea in Italy, although it wasn’t the carbonized apple that interested her.

Some of her students were studying their Roman connections, assuming not altogether wrongly that the explorations would assist their ascension process. It appeared that one of the individuals that had come to their attention, Lucius Crassius, had owned the neighbouring villa.

As Prune spoke the magic words releasing her aunt from marbledom, an unforeseen chain reaction of uncrusting began. One by one the concrete statues and animals that Idle had been collecting became more yielding, less rigid. They didn’t all start gallivanting around at once, it was a slow process depending on the length of time they had been solid.

The buddha by the fish pond had had his knees bent for so long it would be some time before he could straighten them, but it was with great joy that he raised a hand from his lap to scratch the fly droppings off the tip of his nose. He was just about to make a remark about foolish idle people and wise diligent ones when it occurred to him that he’d been completely idle for quite some time, and that it hadn’t been his fault. The unaccustomed questioning of his rather rigid beliefs accelerated the uncrusting process, and he was able to turn his head to see the odd looking cat approaching, but unable to move his arm quickly enough to stop it spraying him with piss.

You have no idea how long I’ve been holding that, said the cat, somewhat telepathically.

A loud gravelly sounding laugh echoed across the pond, coming from the direction of the green man plaque on the wall. The unfamiliar cackle drew Clove out from the kitchen to see who it was.

“I have so much to say!” the green man cleared his throat, spitting out some moss that had become stuck between his teeth, “And I’ve waited so long to say it! You there, you! Don’t go away!” The green man immediately realized his predicament. He had a face but no body. He would have to wait until an audience came to him to listen.

But Clove was interested and inched closer. She had just been researching Dionysus for a project; what a fortuitous coincidence that a replica of him had come to life. She would be able to interview him for her report. She’d just read that “It is perhaps an indication of the Green Man’s power as an archetype that he was able to transfer so seamlessly from one culture and one set of beliefs to another.”

This was exactly the angle she was after.