David Hadley's Blog, page 111

A New Morning

So then I looked out of our bedroom window upon a world that was… well, not new exactly, but a slightly different one to the one we had yesterday. At least, that is what we normally presume. After all, a morning is a lot like the ones before and – we suppose – much like the ones to come, considering the vagaries of weather and season, of course.

Even when I managed to emerge from the bathroom and make my way down the stairs I did not think much had changed, even though there was something not right about the morning. I stopped on the verge of the kitchen door, wondering if I’d made a mistake and today was a Bank Holiday, when I realised what I’d noticed was how quiet it was out there. Ours is not a busy road, leading from nowhere to nowhere, only more of the same houses on the same housing estate. But, usually, there was some activity on a working week morning, no matter how desultory.

‘Quiet… too damn quiet,’ I muttered, making a note to myself to Google – once and for all – what film that quote was from.

The kitchen looked normal… well, normal for our kitchen, which at this time in the morning usually resembles the aftermath of an explosion in a busy restaurant.

The kettle didn’t boil and the radio didn’t work, though.

I assumed a power cut… again.

I trudged upstairs to tell the wife… she wasn’t there.

Nor were the kids.

Later, nor was anyone on the street… all the houses were empty and there was no-one on-line, and even with the remaining battery power in my laptop could I find anyone, or anything on-line… not even Google.
It was then I realised I was truly alone.

 
[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Opening Rounds

 

Although, it isn’t all that often she gets her hands on one. At least, not one that she finds meets her rather exacting standards. After all, she is a bit fussy about that sort of thing and only the ones that match her requirements will go through to the next round.

After all, these are not matters rushed into willy-nilly… as it were. She does have certain standards she would like to keep up as long as flesh is willing and so forth. She does, of course, as we all do, live in a neighbourhood where certain standards are expected and are adhered to, as much as is possible, anyway.

So, there she was with the measuring tape and the weighing scales, standing out in the front garden, with all the contestants forming an orderly queue back down the street. Many of whom had taken the day off work just to attend this initial selection round. After all, word does get around and that word – as far as she is concerned - is very good indeed. Especially that thing she does with the… er…. Well, obviously, if you live within a twenty-five mile radius of her house you’ll know all about that and the rather notorious court case that followed. The council still haven’t managed to fill in the pothole, even now, all these years afterwards. They claim - with some justification, admittedly - that it is now something of a tourist attraction, bringing much-needed revenue to the area.

There is some talk of raising a statue to her in the near vicinity. Although, there is much debate on precisely how a statue commemorating her achievements can be constructed without falling foul of the obscenity laws and several local ordnances concerned with maintaining a certain amount of decorum in the locality. There is also fear such a statue could also frighten the horses as well as those of a nervous disposition.

Anyway, the results of this initial first round should be out once she has tested all the applicants and the ambulances have carried the disqualified contestants away for much needed rest and recuperation.

So, we’ll be back here next week to hear the local major and – possibly – a major A-list celebrity read out the names of those qualifying for the next round.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Word Harvest

So, if any of those of you gathered here this morning want to see just why there is nothing left to say, please make your way over to the word bucket. There you can see for yourselves that it is, indeed, empty.

That is apart from a couple of slightly dented conjunctions and an adverb with post-end-of-sentence-proposition shock.

Of course there was a time, long ago when this was all words as far as the eye can see. Back then, there wasn't just one word bucket, but massive word barns, filled to the brim with all kinds of words, harvested when ripe and lush and already forming crude sentences of their own.

Back then, the word fields were full of words growing strong through the summer, up above the height of a man's head some of them were. It was good in those days to be a word farmer with the fields all ripe and ready waiting for the start of the harvesting season.

There were people – poets and other writers mostly – who used to come out to pick their own words too. Usually for some special piece they were writing, or just for the feel of getting their hands dirty. They would pluck the words from the fertile soil with their own hands and carry them home in a basket at the end of a weary day.

Now, though, all that is gone. Times change and so they must. Now the field next door has a crop of lolcat pictures ripening in the sun. The markets are full of YouTube videos, and people are all growing their own selfies on allotments and in back gardens.

It looks as though it could be the end for these fields that were once so full of so many words.

Maybe we will miss them when they are gone.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Approved Certificate in Advanced Mandolin Disporting

Ah, right.

So, if you could just hold this mandolin in the officially sanctioned manner, then we’ll get around to it shortly.

Of course, there are a relatively small number of Health and Safety forms you must complete before you are allowed past the gate. Especially if you have not received the correct training, nor do you have the approved certificate in advanced mandolin disporting.

Those within the acceptable range of diversity criteria mandated for the current level of public mandolin disporting should have an up-to-date certificate of competence. Then – in the fullness of time – there should be no reason whatsoever for the officials at the gate to take any request to go out in public with a mandolin into consideration.

This current government merely took over from where the last Laborg government got up to. They decided the only way they could avoid getting the blame for anything was to make more or less everything illegal – at least in public. As well as keeping a close eye on what everyone gets up to in private, of course.

Consequently, there has been a remarkable drop in unfortunate mandolin incidents out in the public areas of this country. This is hardly surprising, as some (now-silenced) critics said at the time, since it is now almost impossible for anyone to get the necessary paperwork completed in time before the shops shut. Providing the necessary minimum number of shop staff have themselves managed to get through the checkpoints at all the road junctions between their homes and their place of work without incident, that is.

However, much to these critic’s surprise the government has produced figures to show the current restrictions on what used to be - rather quaintly – regarded as individual rights and freedoms has produced an economic boom. Especially in the delivery services and – of course – in the record number of security staff and the bureaucratic backup necessary for them to function.

The supine acquiescence of the population in general has surprised the critics too. Most of whom seem quite happy to forgo the hassle of acquiring the necessary paperwork that would enable them to venture outside in safety. However, some say this general support for the policy could collapse if the government fail to live up to their promise of making sure there is something good on the telly at least once per evening viewing schedule.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Something for the Weekend: Free Short Story – Twisting the Night Away

[Twisting the Night Away - Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)] Twisting the Night Away

(Short story – 5,000 words approx.)

If you want to get an ex-girlfriend back, what could be a better way of impressing her than a magic carpet ride through the night to a romantic evening together in some alternate dimension?

[Twisting the Night Away - Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)]

[…]

I looked at my hands, they didn’t look that powerful. I had trouble opening a new jam jar with them, let alone creating a world out of nothing.

Morgan took my right hand in his, holding it just below the wrist. ‘Relax,’ he said.

I tried to relax as he manoeuvred my arm around, outlining some weird shape in the cold night air.

I felt something in the air change, as though the air around us had grown thick and heavy, then an instant later the feeling was gone. He jerked my hand back with a short sharp tug and let my arm drop.

‘Ah…’ he said.

The duck quacked.

Up until then there had been only the two of us standing up on the cold damp roof.

Now there was the two of us… and a duck.

The weather may have been suitable for ducks, but the duck itself seemed far from happy. It quacked and stared up at us.

‘That….’ Morgan said. ‘That doesn’t usually happen.’

I was staring at my hand. It had done a lot of things that hand, sometimes some very strange things, but this was the first time it had produced a duck out of thin air. I didn’t know how I expected my hand to look different, just that I was disappointed it didn’t.

Meanwhile, Morgan was walking around the duck with the cautious air of someone half-expecting the waterfowl to explode. He glanced up at me, keeping half an eye on the duck ‘It’s definitely a duck,’ he said.

I raised my eyebrows….

‘Sometimes a duck is not a duck,’ Morgan said with a tone to his voice that suggested his caution about the possibility of the duck exploding was based on some personal experience.

I took a step back. ‘What are we going to do with it?’ I said, watching the duck carefully. ‘Can’t we send it back?’

Morgan looked at me. ‘Back where?’

‘Back where it came from?’

‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘No… I thought….’

Morgan raised a hand, while he stroked his chin with the other. ‘Tony,’ he said in a universe-weary sounding voice. ‘It is not that simple.’

‘Oh….’ I said, knowing it wouldn’t be…. Nothing ever is.

Morgan stepped back from the duck and moved his hand in a gesture that seemed to slip sideways out of this universe and into some other place.

The duck looked at him. ‘Quack?’

‘Bugger…,’ Morgan said. ‘I thought that might be it.’

[…]

[Twisting the Night Away -

Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)]

The New Alien Overlords

That was, of course, the way it happened, even though – at the time – there were those who pooh-poohed the whole idea. Many of them disbelieving something like that could happen nowadays without at least some activity on one or another of the now-ubiquitous social media.

However, a spokesbeing for the alien’s PR Company insisted that it was not so much an alien invasion, certainly not in the traditional sense, as more of an acquisition of a failing planet.

The alien’s PR company spokesbeing then went on to outline various schemes and ideas they’d come up with to get Earth, as they put it, ‘back on the road to civilisation’. Then going on to suggest that until humanity carried out significant improvements in the so-far woeful attempts at human civilisation then the Earth would continue its exclusion from the Galactic Federation. Thus forgoing all the benefits that entailed, up to and including some very tempting Special Offer vouchers redeemable in some of the finest HyperMegaMarkets in the known universe.

Of course, as soon as they realised the Earth was under possible threat from potential alien invaders, the Earth’s politicians leapt into action and demanded to know what was in it for them.

However, after a few of the less significant politicians (mostly MEPs as it turned out) were ‘accidentally’ caught in the beam of an alien disintegration ray, the remaining politicians suddenly became much less vocal. Especially so when the new alien overlords revealed the new Whole Earth Senate the aliens set up for the politicians on one of the smaller moons of Jupiter. The aliens also promised the politicians could take as many of their more nubile ‘research assistants’ with them to the new facility.

Then the alien overlords announced everyone on Earth could take the next week off work on full pay. Thus was their mastery of Earth and its inhabitants made complete.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The End and the Beginning

She stood at the window, wrapped in the sheet pulled from her bed, drinking from a cup of black coffee held gripped between both her palms. Occasionally, as she stared out of the window she brought the mug up to her cheek as though she gained some comfort from its warm touch.

Outside the window it was a warm, early summer morning. The window was slightly open and a morning breeze shifted against the curtains, making them shiver rather than moving them.

She sighed and let the sheet drop, feeling the cooler air brush her naked skin. Glancing down, she could see goose pimples covering her skin and her nipples hardening. She smiled at some memory. Then she drained the last of the coffee from her mug, looking up as a seagull screamed and dived over the edge of the nearby cliff towards the sea. She took a deep breath, tasting the salty sea air on her tongue. She turned away from the window, glancing down at the bed that – this morning – seemed far too big for just her.

She put the mug down on the dressing table, thought about looking at herself in the mirror but turned away instead, heading for the bedroom door.

‘It may feel like the end,’ she muttered to herself as she stroked her fingers through her long red hair. ‘But, actually, this is just the beginning.’

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The World from the Tower

I no longer know, not any more. There was a time when I could look down on this world from this tower and see it all spread out before me. Back then I thought I knew what it would be like to be one of the gods, looking down on this world, on the people going about their lives. Not once, back then, did I ever wonder why the gods would have made us and set us down upon this world to go about our business.

Back down on the ground, as I went about my day in the temple below the tower, I would look up at the sky so far beyond the tower and wonder what the gods were doing. I knew, or at least, I thought I knew, that what I was doing would please them. After all, I am the High Priest and it is me they speak through to the people… or at least, they used to.

I don’t know what has changed. I am not sure if the gods are still there, and that they no longer speak to me. Or whether I imagined everything and there are no gods and they never spoke to me.

I can remember that first day so well. I remember the monk in the school falling to his knees in front of me as the voice came from somewhere both inside me and outside me at the same time, speaking the words of the gods.

Back then, as the monk himself swore, I did not know a single word of the High Language. I knew nothing of the language of the gods. Yet there I was, speaking the words of the books as though I’d been born speaking the language of the gods.

From that day on, for the rest of my life right up until a year ago today, the gods spoke to me, and through, me. But since that day, last year, they have been silent.

Still I do not know if it is me or them that are to blame.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Hands Pass Through

Hands Pass Through

The people are like ghosts,
all drifting through our lives,
sometimes all reaching out
towards this world beyond
almost here within touch.

Like ghosts, our hands will pass
right through it all, as though
there's nothing there to hold.

Our lives become a haunting
of empty air and place
as silence grows around us

filling all the times
between our births and deaths
with forms and situations.

We meet with only shapes
of other people’s lives
as some soft disturbance
of air can leave the dust
lying unperturbed and still.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

These Walls

Walls.

I hadn’t thought about walls much before. They were just there, there to keep the cold and the rain out. They were the barriers my enemies were invariably on the other side of to me. Sometimes those enemies were inside walls and I had to get them out somehow, or – sometimes - I was behind the walls where my enemies could not get at me. Despite, this I hadn’t thought that much about walls much through my life.

That is, until I came here.

Now, these walls - all four of them - bound my life. One has a solid wooden door in it and one has the small high window with the thick rusted iron bars across it. The other two are as bare as my life now.

Oh, I do have a ceiling and a floor, of course. I also have a bed, a chair, a table and a hole in the corner of the room. But it is the walls that fill my thoughts. It is the walls I stare at all day and it is the walls I dream of at night.

I would’ve thought, before I came here, that it would be thoughts of what lies beyond these walls that would torment me. That I’d fill my waking hours with thoughts of all I’ve lost, lying beyond these walls. My dreams filled with the temptations of everything that now lies far beyond my reach.

But, no… all I think about is these walls. The large black bricks, slick with a dampness that never dries. The poor light fills this cell with deep shadows. All I can see when my eyes are open are these walls and all I see when I can no longer bear to see them, and close my eyes, are these same four walls.

But none of that does worry me. Because I know that when they do take me from here, which they will do soon, then that will be the last time I see the sky. It will be the last time I see these walls, or remember that I once had a life beyond them.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]