Delivery of a secret fantasy

‘It’s a smallish nuisance, yes.’

In her world that meant catastrophic. Instant dismissal for the culprit. For some crime as heinous as the wrong choice of cup for her afternoon tea.

But she wasn’t in her world. And those five words, hinting at an unspeakable problem, confirming an unavoidable and regrettably indefinable absence, the last she’d say.

Smut-dusted fingers seized her phone. Scarlet mouth, in a face the more barbaric for its creases being grimed with black smiled wetly.

‘Sweetling, you should’ve known the best place to come for more than fifty shades of grey would be a charcoal-burner’s hut.’ 

Heightened awareness

As with a daylight visit to a nightclub, when the morning-after, melancholic echo of late-night jazz brings only sour emptiness and headache, the reality of spunk-starched sheets and stickiness, stale breath and stubble rash, rarely failed to deduct pleasure from the memory of the night.

Not until my eyes alighted on the tawdry apparatus for the drugs we’d taken, until I heard the crackle of the plastic as I turned, saw your tethered wrists, your staring, sightless eyes, did I understand why the ecstasy of last night’s orgasm was so vividly recalled.

Going out tonight?

I checked my watch. Asked my brother, ‘She ready yet?’

‘Nah. Bet you a pound to a penny she’s on the phone to her sister. Waffles on for hours, saying sweet FA.’

Impatient – we were already twenty minutes late – I went upstairs, with the intention of knocking on the bedroom door; geeing her up. Came down without doing so.

‘Told you so –‘

I looked at him. Obdurate old sod but heart in the right place. As was hers. After I told him what I’d overheard – no sisterly conversation necessitates those sort of responses! – he knew exactly where to strike.

Duplicity

Summer mornings, spine unwilling to support me, knuckles galled but brain bright as ever I dictate my novels from the chaise longue beside the French windows. (Wintertime I transfer to its twin, beside the fireplace.)

‘A cat!’ you cry, occasioning a hiatus in my concentration. Together we watched it stalk and fail to catch its quarry. My next sentence lacks precision.

‘Scrub that,’ (an ugly phrase I learned from you). I watch as you apparently obey, unaware you expect me to die before your perfidy becomes known.

Before this latest book is published. My words. Your name upon the cover.

Caveat emptor

Even before I introduced myself I scored her ten out of ten for truthfulness: “5’9”, dark hair and classy” exactly as advertised. Mesmerised by fingernails the exact same shade as the chillies inserted into each green olive, by lips glistening as she placed them, one by one into her mouth I contemplated challenging her claim of “celibate”, imagining her straddling me; those nails scoring scarlet across my chest.

I ordered a second bottle, to be delivered to my room.

There, conversation turned to what I assumed was consent. Until fingers turned guardian, became portcullis. When I further demurred, to scalpel.

What Elsie would’ve told them if she could

Last week Michael waited ‘til I’d bought an orange one then asked for spearmint. I’d never heard of them. Pale bluey-green colour and thick because, he said, of being made of milk. Wouldn’t even give me a lick.

I heard the chimes, watched the pretty painted van park across the road. Mummy’d said no pocket money for being naughty so I took my silver threepence out my money-box.

The smiley ice-cream man had a pirate scarf and earrings. Said it’d be a shame and I could earn threepence by coming on board and tidying the lolly sticks.

So I did. 

Acquiescence

In a voice soft as a lullaby, sung by a mother tip-toeing  from the pastel-painted room wherein, spread-eagled, lay her sleeping babe, tiny fingers folded and sucking blister still anointed with a gleaming drop of bluish milk, he said, ‘You will.’

I too spread-eagled, but not from choice: wrists and ankles tethered with coarse strips of chemical-impregnated sacking which irritated my already-chafed-to-rawness tender skin.

My voice just as muted. My screams had been silenced with breath-taking brutality, as evidenced from the grape-sized bruises to my throat, if not my now fear-flaccid lungs.

And because I knew I had no choice.

Takes two to tango

Garlic breath and vindaloo-derived stomach-gurgles undoubtedly a counter-indicator to a night of passion, even had I believed his claim of a magnificence of other attributes. (Such claims, from experience, I had learnt to divide by two or even three to come somewhere near the truth.)  

Yet his conversation was stimulating, his sense of humour (from whence derived his self-promotion) on a par with mine. So we had reached the door of my apartment before I finally decided ‘No’. Whereupon he proved himself much the faster at bundling fake civility out of sight. To reveal a knife more magnificent than mine.

Test match

Like many men who worship cricket he rhapsodised about the crack of leather on willow and spent much of that summer trying to convert me. It being necessary to attend daily, and stay until the stumps were drawn, he was sensitive enough to keep me sweet by providing hampers and champagne, by introducing me to his friends confident, in spite of their much better looks, their more sparkling conversation, I’d not stray.

And knowing, in the coolness of the evening, I knew no-one else so deliciously, efficiently capable of applying leather, raising puckered weals on this Willow as did he. 

When ignorance is not exactly bliss

Fine-plucked eyebrows circumflexed above irises the smokey ochre of ancient beeswax, whose hardness matched the jargon they resembled.

‘Jason, it is considered vulgar to express a concern for the pecuniary, but since you ask, five-hundred for a blow-job, two grand for a fuck and no bareback.’

Swaddled

He was a teller of tales, a fabricator of fables, a sewer of stories, ever needing to build ramparts to protect me from the outer world.

He was my teacher, of all I ever needed to know; my preacher when I questioned how to live, my chastiser when I contravened his rules. He tended me when I fell ill, argued against what he termed the unreason of my objections. Taught me to be loved and to love in return.
Brought me to bloom, to bloat, to bear his child. And made me promise to tell no-one he was my father.

From the Humber

I did not plan to spoil your homecoming but word came yesterday the Caroline had been early-sighted off Spurn Point. Within the hour I shall make my way to the high point of your land. From fields still corduroy-ploughed, sheltered by hawthorn  salt-scoured from winter black to jute, I shall watch for you, before returning home to await you.

For a man returned from a thirteen-month voyage should not be publicly greeted by an eight-months-gone wife. I know your flensing knife will peel me as the flux is peeled from wire,   releasing copper-stinking blood and exposing the bastard babe beneath. 

Realism

When we were together  her post-coital drawings were executed large, in charcoal; on whatever paper was already on the easel. Fast because she’d then return to bed, splaying grimy fingerprints across my chest.

Now she uses pastels, paper-wrapped to keep her fingers clean. Renders you in earth colours: burnt sienna, raw umber, sanguine. I doubt you’d let her lay so much as a lone finger on those expensive  linen sheets.

Worry no more.  Having dealt with you, having newly-patterned your  sheets, I’ll shred those tender drawings to better replicate the scene before me.

Then I’ll go in search of her.

'If music be the food of love -'

He claimed not to know his crochets from his quavers. When I commented on the elegant length of his fingers, said he never played; had no instrument on which to do so.

I believed him until the night I, having escaped from Peregrine’s roadster, camisole unbuttoned but virginity intact, passed by the Lodge and heard him playing.

On a whim I knocked at the stout door. Music ceased, bolts were drawn. He was not pleased to see me.  ‘Milady –‘

I thought appeasing  would be easy. But in praising length had failed to appreciate their strength. Or his sexual bent.

Horizontal thoughts

 Tip of tongue started at the hollow in my  throat, her warm, topaz-gold tiger’s eyes glinting a promise of more to come. In my head, while rational thought was still possible, I addressed the sanctimonious prick that was my brother, assured him yet again that paid-for variation way out beat the thrice-weekly ennui of the marital bed he, ever-adamant, tried to convince me was superior.

He didn’t know how much his wife liked money. And I doubt he let her do to him what she – tongue marinaded in honey with just a soupçon of paprika – so deliciously did to me.

A domestic scene of devastation

I remembered several such from childhood; me as fascinated by the magic litany of words: vanilla essence, cochineal, angelica and  silver dragées, as by the ingredients, the butter-creaming, egg-beating bun-making process itself. (That beetle derivation of the crimson a much later discovery.) My mother, gingham pinafored, embarked on a joint mission of entertainment and education for her daughters, relaxed about the temporary chaos. Wooden spoon, yellow mixing bowl, fluted paper cases and dark-burnt bun-tins.

Fast-forward forty years. Same kitchen. Similar colours. Just a different derivation: blood and shit and vomit. And normality not the only thing  suspended.

Unpredicted serials

The tabs above this post are links to pages where I store serials written in response to weekly prompts posted on the Prediction Fiction blog which I currently host .

The first - 'The Blacksmith's Wife' - ran to forty episodes and became an illustrated book.
I brought it to an end partly for fear of boring readers but also because I recognised that in several ways it is easier to generate the continuation of a tale than think up a new one each week, and thought I should try harder.

However, characters frequently refuse to die. 'From Rhodes' continued the 17th century 'The Blacksmith's Wife' while 'A change in focus' picked up and ran with characters who first appeared in a short story (John Pettinger so vividly that he also forced himself into a novel).

I did try to write a singleton. 'Threshold' was intended as a one-off. But, its narrator still nameless, it today lurched to its 139th episode. And I can't see an ending for it yet.

What I can see is the benefit of a weekly exercise wherein there is a necessity to incorporate three random words into an entertaining tale which extends to no more than 100 words. I've been practising on and off, under different hosts, since 2011 and kno
w how much my writing has benefited.

Off the rails

A measure, perhaps, of my dislocation that for an instance, an aberration of McEwan, I saw you upended. Buried, head first and up to your waist. But in my mind – and there was no saying as to the health and strength of that! – you’d not arrived there violently, but had ...

... no you could not have done, not achieved the age denoted by the sag and wrinkle of your buttocks, without suffering in one way or another.

But at least, I reassured myself, our love had endured, hadn’t it? No loss of trust –

– only to be immediately proved a liar for, beyond you, in this bizarre mental journey through my past, and just as unkindly displayed, was ... I can’t, even now, say his name, not with you so close.

So was I to end my journey here? Between the two of you? If so, which way should I face? Ah, but ... it wouldn’t be my face, would it? Which made it easy.
Because he always took me from behind.

[Canvas prompt: a photograph by Josh Box from House of Writers]

Morning has broken

When I was sure it was over  – I’d waited until a paler square of light drifted into shape on the wall opposite the bed, and the candle-flame had faded to ghost – I fetched a jug of water from the kitchen. Tepid for my sake. You no longer likely to flinch from cold, hard though it was to convince myself.

I’d known to place a folded towel beneath you to soak the ochre stains of shit and piss and leave the cotton sheet unmarked.  Unlike the frayed-edge strips wound herringbone around your ribs on which was mapped a rusting archipelago – a continent – afloat amidst the still-scarlet matted waves of your chest.

Cutting, peeling bandages away, I flinched on your behalf. Made amends by the tenderness with which I washed your skin to pale. Pale as the parchment on which you’d writ the words to summon me.  Words writ in ink black as the cloak I wrapped me in. Before I went to tell your wife.

[Originally posted to House of Writers, for Canvas prompt 150]

Striations, suffocation and dried flowers

Suffocation the cause of death. The official cause. Ask me, there’d been damage done before that. Subtle, like. Little at a time. Sly, like she ever was.

Not that I’m saying she deserved it. There’s a difference between administering physical  pain to someone too feeble to resist and the sort of mental torture she used to dish out on a regular basis ...

Well, perhaps the difference isn’t that great. Not when you don’t have the ... I was going to say wits, but it was experience he lacked. Experience and a sense of self-preservation. Though you had to say he preserved himself well enough in the end. After all, she housed and fed him, however unwillingly, and he – coming up to thirty-nine now – never had to worry whether there’d be food enough on the table. Never had to strive to better himself beyond the meniality of a mechanic.

But, from the striations on her back, the mottled blackberry-stain bruises on her legs (they fade so slowly in old age) and the marks across her chest, resembling, at a glance, a scattering  of sun-faded, long-dried flowers (I couldn’t allow my mind to think about what had been used to make them) I’d say he used his work experience – and the tools of his job – to extract his revenge.

And got away with it.

[written in response to House of Writers word prompt 104]