Search Results for 'town'

Corrie:

Funny how things pop up. While Clove was taking supper to the guy in room 8, I signed into Spacenook and the first thing on my perusefeed was an article about maps.

“Cartographies can be altered endlessly to reflect different priorities, hierarchies, experiences, points of view, and destinations.”

How syncy is that. There was another sync like that yesterday, after the kitten fell off the barn roof. I was just posting a photo of the kitten on Spacenook and glanced at the sidebar and there was an ad for a catnip garden memories of dead cats group thing there. I wonder if that dream I had of our old dog Lilly the other day was because the kitten was a remanifestation of her? Lilly’s name was supposed to be Delilah, that’s what it said on her papers, Delilah, but nobody ever called her that. We always called her Lilly.

Anyway, they come and they go, we’ve had hundreds of cats wander through this town, but they always come back. I saw a rat the other day and it reminded me of Boozer, the old sheepdog we had when we were little.

Funny thing was, yesterday morning I’d posted this poem by Mary Oliver:

“…. Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”

Made me feel a bit better when I read it again later, because I did wonder if I’d got there quicker when I heard it crying, when it must have been halfway done falling and stuck on a branch, it might not have ended up the way it did. It must have been meant to be that way I suppose. Well, she’ll be back. They always come back sooner or later.

Sighing, I refocused on the article.

“Maps produce new realities much as they seek to document current ones. Maps are always a going-beyond the space-time of the present.”

No mention of a room full of map covered mannequins in the Brundy place though.

Bert watched Clove disappear down the hall, and crept out from his hiding place behind the door of the room opposite room 8. He’d positioned himself to get a look at the new guest; something about Prune’s description of him had set of alarm bells in his mind and he wanted to see the new guest for himself.
Silent as a cat, he crept over and pressed his ear to the strangers door. Nothing but the sounds of cutlery scraping plate. Bert waited.
Time limped along but Bert stayed put with his ear pressed to the door. Eventually, he heard it. That humming noise. He remembered it, although he didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what to make of it.
He’d been ten years old when he heard it the first time, ten years old when a dust covered man in a broad brimmed hat had appeared in town. Dang, the guy hadn’t aged in all these years. He was sure it was the same fella, he’d known it the minute he saw him through the crack of the door, but especially now he’d heard that humming.

Mater:

I feel myself moving slowly today. The thought of death and my poor little guinea pig is still nagging. It occurs to me that perhaps I am walking slowly because I don’t want to move too fast into the inevitable.

Or perhaps it is just that I did not sleep so well last night. It is so damned hot and night time offers little respite from the heat.

At least the kids have stopped fighting. I worry about them. Always shut away in their rooms on that internet thing.

I am so tired. More tired than I should be. It is not the usual aches and pains. Something feels wrong. I have made up my mind to go and visit Jiemba, the local aboriginal healer. It is a wee bit of a walk, so I will need to start early, before the heat gets up. I don’t want to ask Dido to take me. “Just go and see the doctor in town!” she will say to me. For all her alternative ways, Dido can still be pretty closed minded about some things—and she thinks I am a crazy old fool anyway.

But I think Jiemba has the gift—special healing powers—and he comes from a family of aboriginal healers. His father was a healer and his grandfather too. I went to see him once, his father, years ago. My back was bad and the doctor in town said I would need an operation. He did some chanting, calling up spirits I think, put his hand on my back and pulled out a stone. He said the stone was the sickness causing my back pain, or some such thing. I was sceptical at the time, but my back never did give me any more bother. I’ve read up on it since then and I think there is something in it all. The older I get the more I realise I don’t know it all.

Besides, there is something else I want to ask him about and I don’t know who else I can talk to. That’s the problem with getting old—one of the problems anyway—people tend to assume you are losing your marbles if you say anything out of the ordinary.

But I think the Inn is haunted.

Another bang on my bedroom door, my hands suspended over the keyboard. “Go away Prune!” I shouted, exasperated. “If you bang on my door again, I’ll come out and give you such a wallop, now bugger off, will you!”

“It’s me, Corrie” came Clove’s voice. Walked over to the door and unlocked it. A chat with my sister might help me with this project. Unlike Prune, who would be guaranteed to disrupt my train of thought.

Locking the door again I tell Clove what I’m writing about. We don’t go to school, me and Clove, we’re what they call “homeschooled” but what that actually means in our case is that we’re left to our own devices most of the time. Aunt Idle asks us (when she remembers) what we’ve been working on, and as long as we’ve been writing something or researching something, she’s happy.

So when I saw the group project about alternative timelines to avoid the disaster timeline, I had some ideas. Well, to be honest, I didn’t have any definite ideas until I saw the other suggestions. All Americans, and all of them talking about changing the timelines by changing the results of presidential elections!

“Not much chance of a different timeline there then!” remarked Clove astutely.

“Exactly!” I knew Clove would get it, she knows were I’m coming from, but then, everyone knows twins are like that.

“So this is what the plan is, right: “The goal of this exercise is to discuss amongst the group and choose significant past moments, and then As a Group, focus on creating alternate histories, thus sparking alternate timelines. We should vividly imagine moving forward from those probability forks and creating a more viable and desirable future.” Oh, and this bit here: “ our current timeline is convoluted to the point where many probabilities are leaning towards a disaster scenario simply to shake out of the current focus.” And then all these suggestions about different presidents, and then this: “My suggestion would be also to consider how we would like our current time frame to appear,” so I’m thinking…”

“I’m thinking” interrupted Clove, continuing my train of thought, “Of all those states and communities that got with the programme ten years ago, and took their kids out of school and built those Earthships so they didn’t need money for water and electricity..”

“And started cooperative worker owned businesses like they do in South America….”

“And they all started a guaranteed basic income years ago, so everyone was doing what they did best, especially the kids, cos they had such great ideas and weren’t stuck in boring schoolrooms…..”

“and there was no poverty, and nobody without a home…”

“Yeah, and they all stopped paying taxes so there was no money for the military, and then loads more people stopped paying taxes too…”

“Good one, Clove!”

“So nobody gave a fuck what president was elected anyway, because they were all sorting themselves out, and those states and communities were doing so well…”

“Because they’d already been doing it for years” I added.

“…that other states and communities started doing it too.”

“So that it snowballed, like dominoes, and there were more and more of these places..”

“And they had exchange students and stuff like that to learn from each other, and shared stuff online..”

“So when the disasters struck, it wasn’t half so bad because there were already a bunch of people managing perfectly well without dollars or oil, and they could help the people in the disaster. Makes more sense that electing another blimmin president, huh?”

“Bloody obvious if you ask me” replied Clove. “Pity we don’t have basic income, did you see Mater’s face when she was talking to that debt collector?”

That made me laugh, remembering her waving the stick around. “Her face was as purple as her cardigan.”

In unison, we both starting singing Start Wearing Purple and dancing around, acting the fool. I had a purple wig hanging on the back of my chair, so I put that on, and Clove grabbed a purple feather boa off the coat stand. No shortage of wigs in this town, though god only knows why. Just about every damn trunk in every empty house is full of wigs.

The first time one of the guinea pigs died I went up to my bedroom, closed the door and cried. Not just cried. I sobbed my eyes out. Great gasping sounds such as I had not uttered in many a long year. An old lady shouldn’t be crying like that over a damned rat-like critter so I made sure no one else heard me. It’s peculiar that it took me so hard, because I always disapproved of the children having pets. It was that Prune. Begged and pleaded with her Aunt Dido when they went into town one day. And Dido is so damned soft with the kids. I’m always telling her that. Not that she listens. Spoils them rotten to make up for them not having parents around when what they really need is a good slap across the backside. Of course the lazy child cared for the poor wee things for about 5 minutes before she got bored. So I took over their care. Now another one is poorly and I can feel the familiar fear clutching at my heart.

Death. He’s got his ugly scent all around this damned town.

Like that debt collector that came by this morning. I could smell death on him soon as I saw him at the door. I got rid of him quick smart. Told him I couldn’t hear a word he was saying and shook my walking stick at him. It’s not my walking stick—I can still walk just fine. I can even get a bit of a gentle jog going if the situation warrants it. No, I found it at the back of one of the cupboards when we were cleaning out the guest rooms. It sure comes in handy sometimes. Nothing like a bit of walking stick brandishing to show who’s the boss around here.

He’ll be back of course. With some big fancy official letter and maybe a bit of back up next time. Now he knows who he is dealing with.

Unknown to the family, Bert is Abcynthia’s father. Her mother, now dead, had an affair with Bert, so when Abcynthias left the town to go to university, she thought that both her parents were dead. Some of the remaining old codgers had their suspicions, but it was a well kept secret ~ not least, because of Horace Hogg’s (Abby’s father) violent and unpredictable nature. Fred’s family, Idle and his mother, are new to the town, coming only because Fred married Abcynthia (from now on known for short as Abby because it’s a fucker to spell)
Abby’s mother, Hannah Hogg, died in somewhat suspicious circumstances shortly before the mines closed.

“You know what, Godfrey? I could just happily populate imaginary towns and then leave them all to get on with it, you know what I mean? I could call myself The Populator. My George, I think I’ve found my forte.”
“Well, you are known for an unbridled passion for introducing new characters that nobody understands, Liz.”
“Exactly!” she replied happily.

Of the original inhabitants of the town, few remained. There were a dozen or so old codgers, too old for change, whiling away their dry days on the state pension. A handful of young families had attempted to set up an alternative self sustainable cooperative, forming a little enclave on the outskirts of town, raising chickens, rabbits and sheep, and lots of naked unruly brats with ankle bracelets. The solar panels looked incongruously shiny and sharp against the backdrop of dust and dilapidation.

Most of the houses in Bonemarsh were uninhabited, in various stages of dust and decay. A number of them had been left with their interiors intact though, as if the occupants had just not come home from work one day. Exploring the empty houses was a wonderful game for the few children left in the town ~ full sized play houses, complete with full sized toys. No tiny prams or miniature tools were required to play pretend with, as they had the real things at their disposal.

Exploring the wardrobes and trunks under the beds had given them many strange costumes and unexplainable objects to play with. The children didn’t really wonder about all the wigs, not at the time, they were just delighted to have so many to play with. Later, in retrospect, they wondered why a mining town had quite so many wigs.

Bert knows a thing or two about the past, the town and the family, but he says very little about it other than offering cryptic one liners and knowing looks.

He was a miner when the mines were open (and he could tell you a few things about the goings on), and never left the place, managing to scrape by on kangaroo and cassowary meat and doing odd jobs, sometimes finding a gold nugget and selling it on ebay. He has a soft spot for the children, especially the rude and contrary Prune.

Does he have a strange sense of responsibility to Abcynthia? He hangs around the inn, unofficially making himself useful with odd jobs, and lives in a shed out the back.

The Flying Fish Inn was passsed down to Abcynthia (the childrens mother) from her father, who had a boarding house during the gold rush. He died just after the mine closed and Abcynthia closed the place up and moved to the city where she went to university and met her husband Fred (name to be arranged later).

Fred was a journalist who aspired to write a science fiction novel. He convinced his wife to give up her career as a corporate lawyer, and raise a family at the old inn in the outback, while he write his novel and earned a rudimentary income from writing articles online, enough to live on. Just after their 4th child was born, Abcynthia had had enough, and left the family to pursue her career in the city.

Fred’s sister Aunt idle was at a loose end at the time, needing to keep a low profile and “disappear” for reasons to be discovered, and agreed to come and help Fred with the children. Fred’s cranky mother had already been living with them for a few years but was not up to the responsibility of the four children while Fred was busy writing.

A few months after Abcynthia’s disappearance, some unexplained incidents occurred in the area around the ghost town and the defunct mines ~ possibly connected to the sci fi novel Fred was writing in some way ~ which Fred wrote articles about, which went viral in the popular imagination and thirst for weird tales, and visitors started coming to the town.

Aunt Ilde started to informally put them up in rooms, and enjoyed the unexpected company of these strangers which relieved her increasing boredom, then as the visitors increased (not so very many, but two or three a week perhaps) decided to officially reopen the boarding house and a B and B.

Fred, though, must have had some kind of a meltdown because he left a cryptic note saying he’d be back, and to carry on without him for the foreseeable future. Nobody really knew why, or where he had gone.

(a totally random one)

San Diego
– a mystery
by Ewrick

The cosy, Cornish town of San Diego holds a secret.

Gregory Khan has the perfect life working as a shopkeeper in the city and gyrating with his lovable girlfriend, Ruth Donaldson.

However, when he finds a tattered torch in his cellar, he begins to realise that things are not quite as they seem in the Khan family.

A Christening leaves Gregory with some startling questions about his past, and he sets off to deserted San Diego to find some answers.

At first the people of San Diego are courageous and helpful. He is intrigued by the curiously hilarious gardener, Una Grey. However, after she introduces him to hard sugar, Gregory slowly finds himself drawn into a web of decadence, sloth and perhaps, even mutilation.

Can Gregory resist the charms of Una Grey and uncover the secret of the tattered torch before it’s too late, or will his demise become yet another San Diego legend?

Praise for San Diego

“Who wouldn’t give up a life of gyrating with their lovable girlfriend to spend a little time with a curiously hilarious gardener?”
– The Daily Tale

“About as mysterious as finding a poo in a public toilet. However, San Diego does offer a valuable lesson about not getting into hard sugar.”
– Enid Kibbler

“The only mystery, is why did I keep reading after page one?”
– Hit the Spoof

“I could do better.”
– Zob Gloop

By the time Lisa and Mirabelle arrived in Lisbon, it was too late. Frank and Molly were already heading south in a stolen car, the whale portal tile on the back seat, next to an assortment of other tiles of various colours and sizes. They were approaching a small town not far from the coast when Madam Li the navigation robot said turn left at your peril in Chinese. Frank hadn’t mastered the arts of intonation fully in his efforts to learn the language, and merely heard “turn left” and something else as incomprehensible to the ear as any other Portuguese town, and besides, the narrow goat track looked marvelously less traveled and enticing.