Lazarian Wordsmith's Blog, page 4

More from Peggy's Secret, Streets of Birdsong and Buteo buteo.

Twenty years or so after I moved to Dublin, I was down home for a funeral. It was a bitterly cold wind-chilling, sleet shower throwing, winter day and I went for a warmer.In the pub beside a big glowing turf fire a brown over-coated figure crouched to catch the heat, his worn, wide brimmed, battered hat, steaming-off the dampness. The barman brought a pint of Smithwicks. Johnny took a Suicre Bag from a pocket and spooned sugar into the glass.I went over and tried to talk to him. He ignored me as if I wasn’t there, continued stirring his sugaring beer and didn’t look up. “We used to live near you. I was two or three. We lived in Maloney's house. Dad and yourself were friends. I think you used bounce me on your knee.”He looked up into my face with eyes as red as the turf coals and the swirling beer.“You had fair hair, almost white. Pull up a chair and tell me how you are.”I told him how I was. He told me stories of rabbits snared, Christmas Turkeys Mam raised and sold, Whist games, Twenty Five and Tricks Trumped, House Dances, Card Tricks and Fools Jokes. All the time he sipped beer sweetened for his old taste.I asked if he still did the Card Tricks. He didn’t he explained: his hands like his taste were old and faltering. But, he said, he was having a good day and he would show me a trick It would remind us of the old knee-bouncing days.From the deep coat pocket he took a well worn deck of playing cards held captive by rubber bands. He released the bands and passed the deck into my hands. “Box them!” He instructed. I shuffled the deck and proffered them back. “Do it again,” he said, “‘till you’re satisfied.” I boxed them again and then once more. The normal buzz of conversation had faded as drinkers gathered around. “Johnny is doing a trick,” was the rallying call.I offered the cards again. He shook his head.Softly head deeply bowed, concentrating, he instructed “You hold them and turn over the top card. It’s a ten of spades.” I placed the ten of spades on the table between us. “It’s a fine trick!” I ventured. “How did you do it?”He looked up slightly. “I’m not finished yet!” He tapped the side of his nose with a skinny shaky finger and then this unique human being: who went to school ‘Til the sixth book only, without hesitation without looking up at me or at the cards in my hand, named all remaining cards before I turned them over and placed them on the table.I asked again how the trick was done. He only smiled and sipped his beer.

This is from the new collection of short stories...

From Peggy's Secret.
https://books2read.com/u/mdLo7X



Donie made the trip to the bog. It was almost a daily ritual when Jonnie was alive. Well! A fair day ritual then. There was nothing as miserable as a wet day in the bog, no shelter and maybe a whipping wind. The wind in summer, made the bog cotton dance on their tall thin green stalks, and the gentle breezes created miniature tornadoes, never, ever, more than a few few tall.
Thank God. The turf is all saved. Poor auld Jonnie. I miss you. At this time of the year with your turf saved you’d say: Sound now for the winter. We have a shed full of dry turf.I went to the Nursing Home to see The Sister. Most days now she just sits beside her bed muttering, and sobbing. I think she’s remembering things that upset her. She’s troubled. I’d say she’s angry about something. You know the way she used get. All huffy - with that look on her face.Maybe she feels ashamed that it’s turned out this way. Sometimes she gets frustrated when you don’t understand what she wants. Poor Peggy her mind is trapped in the past. She just has today and there will be no tomorrow: all she has is yesterdays. Just yesterdays. Only the past for company... I have your caged birds. They're singing again, went silent for a few days after I moved them. Ringo, the Mule, with his fringe, took a bit longer. The call eegits birdbrains, feather heads, but I think the birds missed you as well. What that lot are at isn’t right. She deserves a lot more. Somethin’ has to be done about it. For all our sakes, I better start looking for him. For the boy.

Still plugging away on the sequel....

Fanahan was down, depressed some would call it, but since he did not believe depression existed: for him: he was just down.He was wearing his dark funeral suit. In fact it was also his best suit, a recent purchase that fitted him. Not a fitted, bespoke suit – an off-the-peg selection. He always considered he was lucky that his build was fairly average, if anything can be fairly average, and he could buy a suit that either fitted him, or fitted him with minimum free alterations. Free alterations? Bullshit! When he called back to collect this suit pants that had been reduced, tucked in, at the waist, he threw his eye on a nice slim fit jeans and a smart looking shirt, and a white under-shirt and a pair of slip-on shoes. The ensemble was charged to his card and the free alterations call-back added three hundred lids or so to his bill. All in all, suit and ensemble, he dropped nearly a grand with Humphrey his personal shopper. That was how he introduced himself – a bloody new title for an uppity shop assistant.Milo had died. Or to be precise Milo had drank himself to death. This time, in this establishment, with booze left on the shelves. In other words: he failed to drink his Dublin Pub dry, as he had with the other ones. He previously got big money for selling land at hefty prices, to developers. He than went into the Vintner business, buying pubs, and becoming his own best and long time customer. “I was right,” Fanahan muttered, when he got the news,“this time the liver packed up before the supply ran out.” Cremation was not a real funeral, a real internment. Putting a small box into a grave was the norm now. Six by four that was what a man deserved, and six down as well. This undertaker had just bent down and placed the wooden box covering the urn of ashes, a couple of feet deep. Give me a better send off, Fanahan thought. Scatter my ashes over twenty virgins! Jees! Where would you get twenty virgins today? Primary School? Grade School? All jail bait? Convents? No not any more!“Gerry, give me another pint and a large brandy chaser. Those photographs on the wall of the football match. Milo said I could have them after he was finished with them, For sure that time is now. Take them down and I'll bring them with me.”“He didn't say you could have them, he used them to annoy you – remind you that Cavan beat Galway, in a bleedin' All Ireland Final, but I don't like them either. So take them out of my sight. This is a changed Pub from now on. I might even consider barring some of the customers!”Grate Pictures, just great for starting a nice fire in a grate! Bloody Bob Tyrell, Superintendent Tyrell, the player who won the match. He fell on his feet! Retired, wrote a memoir and is now a security expert on the radio and TV spouting on criminal issues. SHITE.Detective Inspector Shamus Fanahan! Stuck in a policing rut and not going anywhere fast. No woman, no kids, no prospects and now – God help us all no best pal. Milo a best pal? Well OK. No pal at all.

Looking again for forgotten gems I found a rough draft from Here Lies 60's scene.

Brigitte offered another scene. “The Lock.” He remembered the Canal and the Lock, the Barge and Lannigan.They followed the street and left the rows of town cottages to a place of solitary farmhouses. From behind they heard the clip clop of a horse approaching. A low flat hay cart drew alongside. The driver beckoned and they joined three children who sat, legs dangling over the back of the cart between the road and the seesawing bogie. Through a gate they looked into a farmyard where a woman dressed in a long black dress washed clothes in a small bath, scrubbing the soaped clothes along the sideways leaning washboard.Near the bridge, they climbed up the steep and narrow lawn, and jumped off, onto the grassy canal side below, and looked up waved thanks to the centre stone and looked beneath into the lock and the tall black water-keeper gates with sluices that leaked bright, splashing streams to the water level below, and above in the higher stairs, to the harbour beside the grain stores, the swans, the water hens and the beds of green lilly pads with white lilly flowers.A long, black, narrow barge puttered from the narrow upstream channel into the harbour, and waited for the lock side keeper. Lannigan appeared in the splendour of his uniform: a black-grey suit, preceded by his fob and chain secured waistcoat and puffing pipe, grasped beneath a thick grey moustache and a battered narrow brimmed hat. He went quickly to winch the splashing, noisy, water into the lower trough, raise the level then open the gates to capture the barge; then lowering the water to the lower level and releasing the barge into the lower stairwell of the canal, so that it could continue its journey.Job completed the keeper returned to his green gated, rose-arched, cottage pathway, and stopped to remove his hat and mop his brow, checked his timepiece before entering the twilight interior to await another puttering summons.They ran up the hill to the higher level and walked canal-side, past the hazel groves the hawthorns, greengage trees and the damsons, towards the castle and their secret place above the straight keep wall: conquered just like the high orchard barrier with pointed stanchions fashioned from the rusty hay turner.High above the ruins, the dungeons and the lower staircases, moat-circled from invasion by the sedentary blue-green Grand Canal waters, and the diamond glitter on the tumbling darting, skirting Barrow river flow, on their regal seat in the window, beside the battlement walk, they kissed, hugged, sighed, talked and dreamed.

A few years ago a few of us wote about Malevolent Slugs taking over a garden.

K. Langer is a slug, with a wig. So is Harry a  Mutant Slug who can project his thoughts. Both of them are mind readrs and strangly so is Hedda Hoppa and Hedda is a frog....occasional players pop up now an then, like Fly on the Wall...Most of this is in a Cork Accent...Like. Thoughts are in Italics....

Chapter 14.Lies. Lies. Sluggary Duggary.
Quay Langer was lounging nearby and now straightened his wig and slithered into view, slimy, and puffin': he was well out of condition.
Nor fit ar all. Boy. He thought....
Well out of condition. Disgrace. Harry added. Will you tell this Harridan what I tell you to say.
“Yes. Boss. You sent for me. Like.....” He said out loud. And this time keep your thoughts to yourself. Toe the line, Don't rock the boat. Stums the word.
Jese Boss- don't have a boat. Langer thought and strangely Hedda understood all the exchange.
Now that's a turn up for the book, she thought. Must be all this clean living.
Who's a Harridan? She shouted the thought it as well. Blank stares from the two World Leaders. Still trouble at the transmitter? Good.
“Now. The Boss Like, Wants me ta Tell Ya, Like. Dat He Wants to Clean up de Garden. And Like. Wants to bring in Help ta Do It Like. He Says t'wil be T'Riffic when he's finished. A great Place ta Live.”
For Slugs. That is....ha ha ha. Both slugs thought at the same time.
Thought so. Hedda thought but not in italics. Knew you boys were up to something.
We Don't Like...wants to take over the place or an-tin.Klanger thought. To a scream of Guarded Thoughtsfrom Harry. Keep with the message.
“Twil All be. Like. Peaceful. A Peaceful Place .To Live, Work and Play. Like.....”
Yea! Yea! Hedda knew he was lying, lying through the teeth he hadn't got. Both of them in fact were lying. One lying by omission, the other by submission. Well Klanger was relaying Harry's propaganda and Harry wasn't telling the whole story at all. Her journalistic instincts told her these facts, in fact, were not factual facts, at all, in fact.
Exhausted she looked around for sustenance and spied a fly. She was about to strike when the fly cried out. “Hey! Ya can't eat me! I'm the observer to all this documentary history. Ya can't eat me! I'm the fly on the wall, that sees and hears everything!”

You know how it is - you are looking for your wellies and you find a gem!

Have to find somewhere I can use this - Prose Poetry - maybe a dream sequence.
She was walking by the river. The sound of the water running down over the stones and swishing past the reeds was soothing.
Small fish popped their noses through the water and slapped at the flies and insects caught in the upper film as they tried to escape from their riverbed nursery. 
It was early Summer and the riverbank grasses had reclaiming their beds usurped by the Winter floods. 
The trees in the wood had long ago left their frosty nakedness behind and were caressing the breezes that wafted their perfumes to the pigeon squabs in their timber framed homes.
Inside in the wood on a pathway that mirrored the twists and hills of the river path the old man and the young boy walked not close but still alongside her. 
The man was dressed in a white tunic, above this a wide hood was drawn to hide his face.
The boy was about ten years old and was dressed in a green waistcoat. His hair was long, golden when the sun burnished it as it flickered through the canopy.
His lower trunk and legs was hidden by the ferns that forms the undergrowth of all woods. 
The paths were starting to come closer. 
She could hear the pair talking, a jumble of sounds. Soon the paths would meet.

I'm working on draft two of De Buke, now called In The Wicker Wood - Secrets Uncovered..

Fanahan brings the Seeing Eye dog to the Hospital to try and flush out Georgie....

Shay put the boot down, accelerating hard, and headed for the Hospital Prison, hoping that no motorbike Garda came by and stopped the car because of the speed. If that happens, he thought, I hope he's armed I can get him to shoot the dog.They arrived, unfortunately at lunch time. Fanahan tried to get the staff to bring the patients out and line them up in the corridor. He was advised that although Drummond was a place for housing the criminal insane, that not all inmates were criminals. Some he was reminded were not held at the pleasure of the state, but sometimes dumped there by relatives, or in some cases the individuals had no family or friends, or indeed homes.Chastised, Fanahan decided to try and use the dog in the dining room. It was a disaster, the dog was fine and behaved himself, walking where Aoife directed him. It was the patients who messed the process up. They tried to feed him bits of their food, to pet him or call him over to their table. At least Fanahan decided some of this group was not afraid of dogs, so that was good: but it was also bad, for him that was. Others ignored Davie, as he walked around. None however jumped up and tried to get away. One lady thought the dog was her husband reincarnated, “Jerry. Jerry,” she called, “You said you would return as a dog. Tell me Jerry where did you hide the money from the pension you got when you retired?” Then she seemed to remember and tried to lunge at the dog. “I remember, now, you went to the Canaries with that tramp.” And she lunged again at the dog and tried to hit him with her walking aid.Just before they departed Fanahan thought to ask, “Did we cover all of the inmates? Were any missing, were they all in that room?”“Yes Detective, except those confined to barracks for their own safety.” the Matron answered.“Jees, why didn't you tell me. How many?”“Five.”After he cheeked those by holding the dog at the open door of their rooms, without any reaction. He thought to ask, “Are they all drugged up.”“Of course.”“So they wouldn't know if Jack the Ripper, came in to their cells? Bloody hell maybe one of them is Jack.”“Unlikely Inspector.”“Aoife, thanks for your help. I will drive you home now. Hold on a second can you, until I check something”At the entrance he called a warder over and enquired where they stored their empty bottles. Then he moved the car around to the storage and cleared his car boot of the smelly, stinking, covered with spills bottles. Then he drove back to collect Aoife. Now Mutt. You can keep your nose out of my business. As he left he decided to wind down his window and wind up the Matron: who was making sure he left. “Is that the lot then? No bodies in the basement? That's the lot then, all checked out.”Unruffled the Matron confirmed that he had in fact met and examined all the patients. Then she halted. “Except of course except the General, he is on a day out, with some friends.”“The General. Who is he? How long has he been here? When will he return?” Fanahan snapped.“Go easy, please. This evening his friends will bring him back. He's here a good few years now. Harmless. He just thinks he was a soldier in the local defence force. You know during the Emergency.”Emergency? What bloody emergency, a cock up in the nappy supply? Hold on WWII, we called that little barney The Emergency over here. “ You know how to contact me. Let me know when he returns. Meanwhile can I speak with the Warden? Sorry Professor Murray, the man who is supposed to be in charge.”“He was called away without notice Detective. We were all surprised, we need him here to help with the arrangements. Technically the patient was in his care.”Three weeks later when no phone call had been received, Fanahan rang Drummond and found out General was still on a day out with friends. In other words the only suspect he had: who perhaps was Georgie was in the wind, AWOL, over the wall, water under the bridge. Gone. As well he found out the facility had a new Warden. A new Head Man, Shay Smiled at that, and this news didn't surprise him.

I reduced the selling prices on all the Kindle eBooks

November Sale, just in time for Christmas as a gift.

https://www.books2read.com/ap/xq9Ewx/Lazarian-Wordsmith

Enjoy.

Now back to working on Wicker Wood Secrets Uncovered - should be ready for Christmas - NEXT YEAR, pre-planning is a blessing.

The sequel is now named: In The Wicker Wood - Secrets Uncovered.

The second WW book is progressing, sometimes I feel the plot is writing itself - other times I would tell everyone I'm suffering from Writers Block. But that is BS - I'm just a lazy sod dossing. If it wasn't for my dream sequences, when my subconscious takes over and runs with the plot: I would be lost.



“Bob? It's Harry. Sorry for ringing you on the mobile, but other channels are not available. I gave up the landline, the bloody broadband was shite, no use at all...”“Calm down Harry, you're all over the place, you didn't ring me to whinge, God help us, like every other businessman in the rural about the slow WIFI. What is it?”“Bob can you come down, please, I found something that might be related to Bowen.”“Give it to the locals Harry, or HQ: I'm retired.”“It's a list of names, in an old biscuit tin, left on my doorstep, to coin a phrase. One of the names is Paula Stafford. The ones we identified: their names are there as well, Bob.”“Cross of Christ! Are you sure. This could be someone messing with you Harry. Where did you say you got it? Yes I remember now – left by the fairies when you were away.”“I don't think so Bob. But if it's genuine, there's a lot more that eleven names, a lot more than eleven victims.”“We only found eleven graves. Are you telling me Bowen killed more girls?”“Bob, the list has twenty seven names. Twenty Seven!”“God. Harry can you meet me somewhere, you would consider a safe place for a meeting? This has implications we can't imaging: now especially when Bowen is supposed to be dead, but Detective Fanahan swears he is still alive and out there somewhere.” “Owel? Tomorrow Dawn? We will be just two fishermen looking at the dawn rise.”“Clever Harry, not the Sunrise, the dawn rise of feeding fish. Can I bring Shay?”“Good idea, Bob, we need someone still serving, especially if he is inclined to listen to us. See you about four AM.”

Buddy Holly born this day in 1936 (7Sep).

Sitting here trying to write and then Ronan plays Buddy Holly songs, by Buddy and others on the radio.

Some tranquil moments and reflections.

From Here Lies.



The funeral was big. A woman who lived so long deserved respect. He stood with her family as people sympathised: each agreed it was time for her soul to rest.He kept his back to the area of the graveyard where Deirdre lay. When he attended other burials he left by the small gate in the wall nearest the bridge, he never visited her. Now he turned to follow his shadow, a pathway guide painted by the climbing sun, to her. She wasn’t alone any more: her parents were buried beside her. That in itself caused a pang of sadness, a slight tightening in the chest, a queasy feeling down low in the stomach: a memory of a time when he thought that in the end, they would lie side by side. It wasn’t anything they talked about, or even planned, but down there in that country town husbands and wives usually ended up that way: twin plots one headstone; beloved wife devoted husband.He ran their song through his head. It brought him back to the tennis hops. She always saved that dance for him. No, matter who they were with, once the record began, they left and found each other.A soft, “Hello.”“Hello yourself.”She settled within his arms and they slow danced: her chin on his shoulder, their eyes closed bodies moving slowly in unison; stepping to the slow beat one-two-one, one-two-one, one-two-one, alone in a crowd, lost in their world; the one that Buddy brought them to.Sometimes we’ll sigh, Sometimes we’ll cry, And we’ll know why, Just you and I, Know true love ways…The townspeople were leaving to go back to their own lives. Only a few remained, dotted around the plots, at the resting places of their loved ones. The local solicitor, while paying her respects, had asked him to call in when he had time. “I know she left me the wood,” he said. “It's not that she replied. Call soon.”