David Hadley's Blog, page 127

Something Taken and Used

It was as if something was taken and used, leaving us bereft. Somehow, we were not expecting it. We expected our life together to take root and grow, bloom into possibility. Maybe, though, the earth of our time was too stony, too coarse for the early fragile roots to take hold. Our love, when we transplanted it to this new life, to this new marriage and new house, withered and collapsed.

Even the water of possibility, did little to revive it. We lay there together on opposite sides of a bed suddenly far too big, no longer entangled around each other and growing towards the sun of the future. We turned away from each other. She looked out of the window, the curtains blowing in the breeze like some invitation to escape, while I turned to watch the slow hands creeping around the clock until it was safe to get away.

Neither of us ever knew what had gone wrong. We just knew what had once been as familiar as our own reflections in the mirror was now a stranger staring in silence back at us from across the other side of the table.

We never knew what had gone wrong, what had poisoned this new life and left it dying, all we knew was that it was time to dig it all up and start again somewhere new, apart and alone.

The Day of the Battle

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When the day came we were ready. Our forces were spread out on the hill overlooking the mist-shrouded valley. The air was cold, almost frosty. The grass was damp underfoot as we stood together, both wrapped in my heavy fur cloak.

We had spent the night together under that cloak; even then the cold metal of her charms and bracelets had felt cold against my naked skin as we moved together for what could so easily be the last time.

It is always the same on the edge of a battle like this, none of us knows what chance, mishap or even fate – for those who believe in such things – awaits us out there on the field. As the death of my father – the old king – showed, even victory does not necessarily mean survival. Torval, one of my oldest and –sometimes – wisest advisors was short of an arm from the same battle. A loss that cost him dear, far more than the agony of a lost sword arm. Still even now he looked haunted by the battlefields of his past, whether he wanted to return to them a whole man once more, or whether he wanted to flee I was not sure. Sometimes I doubted if Torval himself knew which he wanted. Still, though, he was loyal, as devoted to my service as he had been to my father when they rode into battles side-by-side and drank long into the night side-by-side too. I knew that without him I would not be here today, even though I did not want to be. But war is always inevitable, so we prepared for battle, all knowing it could be glory, or our last day.

Broken At Our Feet

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Broken At Our Feet

Each step creates a universe around us
Where possibilities multiply like stars.
Each day falls back into history behind us
As each morning a new world is created.

All around us this new world grows
Out of what remains of the old life
We thought was the only one
We could ever want or need.

But it lies here broken at our feet
As we turn to walk away, apart.
Each heading off down new roads,
Each following the light of new stars,

And not looking back ever again
To face those memories that lie
Heaped up here waiting for history
To turn them into long forgotten times.

Life takes Time

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It takes time. Life takes time and uses it, mostly when no-one is paying attention. One minute, you are young and there is a whole life waiting for you just around the corner, a life of possibility and opportunity. Then, one step around that corner and your life has somehow got behind you and you can feel that although you are not quite on the last mile, then its end draws ever closer, faster and faster.

Most of the time you do not notice you have stepped around that corner, you feel more or less the same; the world around you is more or less the same as it always has been. Then, when you turn to look at yesterday or the day before it stuns you to find it was thirty years ago. Those you knew then are now parents or grandparents themselves and your own children are now as old as you were then.

Back then, time to crept and crawled arthritically slowly. Even the summer seemed too far away, either just gone or coming up. Now, seasons flicker by like those calendars in old black-and-white films where each day is torn off by some howling gale and lost before you can even reach out a hand to grab it.

And now that last and final page of that calendar is getting ever closer and closer, you can feel it.

Day After Day

The alarm went off… again. This time, instead of hitting snooze I turned it off and glanced up at the closed curtains, seeing the morning light around their edges. Getting out of bed, I stubbed my toe on the book I’d dropped on the floor, just as I had the previous morning. Again, I reminded myself to clear all the junk off the bedside table so I didn’t have to keep dropping my book on the floor last thing at night and stubbing my toe on it again every morning.

I stumbled over to the closed curtains, opening them just wide enough to take a peek at what the world had in store for me. I saw it was raining, just like the day before. I noticed the woman from up the street passing by, again. I’d never learnt her name. She was walking head down in the rain, struggling with her umbrella, just like yesterday morning. It looked as though the wind had blown her umbrella inside out… again.

I turned from the window and found my way to the bathroom. As I was pulling the little tab of silver paper off the new tube of toothpaste, something struck me about the morning so far. But I couldn’t put my finger on what was troubling me.

Down in the kitchen, I put the kettle on to boil and switched on the radio. The news headlines didn’t change, the same stories as yesterday.

Then I remembered what had struck me as odd in the bathroom. I’d opened a new tube of toothpaste yesterday morning too.

Then the newsreader said something about the headlines for Wednesday 16th March. Then, suddenly as the kettle boiled, I remembered he’d said exactly the same thing yesterday: the same day, the same date, just as the kettle had boiled.

Handbag Space

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For a long time now physicists have been perturbed by the missing dark matter which is supposed to make up a large percentage of the matter in the universe. The main problem being that – up until now – no-one could find any trace of this matter anywhere in the universe.

However, thanks to a recent discovery this may all have now changed.

As physicist Perturbation Electronvolt explains:

As a colleague was about to perform an experiment, she realised she was a bit short of a couple of fundamental particles. I told her not to worry as I had a few quarks in my handbag – left over from a university physics department New Year party.

It was then, when I began to root about in the bottom of my handbag that I realised just where all the dark matter of the universe was.

Not only that, I found a bag of mint imperials I hadn’t seen for almost three years. Some of them were a bit fluffy, but they were still edible.

As other physicists around the world repeated her experiment it became clear that Electronvolt had indeed stumbled on the solution to the mystery of dark matter and where it all is, as well as helping reconcile Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity with the nature of mint imperials. This of course, has many ramifications for physics and reformulates our understanding of reality. As everyone knows, handbag space is more or less infinite, with every handbag capable of holding many times what its volume would lead us to believe. This is mainly due to the fact that each handbag is a portal to the many other dimensions – posited by string–theory – which make up our physical universe. We are not normally aware of these other dimensions, except when asked to retrieve an item from a woman’s handbag, where we discover the bag will contain almost everything, usually on top of the item we need.

Some physicists believe that once handbag space is better understood, it may be possible to explore the area further, and – finally - solve the riddle of dark matter once and for all.

That is if they can find a physicist brave enough to enter this strange new dimension.

Into the Shadowlands

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In the end there were too many secrets. There was too much that was beyond control. Secrets generate secrets until they take over everything and what was once real becomes like a shadow reality; where a parallel life goes on in a parallel world.

All of which does seem a bit odd. It was as if what was once real has become shadow and what was once shadow was real; not only that, it was because of the shadow worlds that her life of secrets had become so unmanageable.

Once it was simple for Helen. There was the world and there was everything else that she knew didn’t exist, except in her mind and in those dreams that left her feeling so strange in the mornings. Dreams that made her feel as though she had slipped through some barrier into a world that lay at an odd angle to this one. It was a strange dreaming place, but to her it had more of a feel of where she belonged than this world she lived in, or, rather, merely existed in.

Then came the days she thought of as the time of transition, when more and more of that world from her dreams began seeping into what she had once seen clearly as reality. Reality itself grew soft around the edges, amorphous, as the other world took over, creating corners where there were none and bringing new worlds out of the shadows and quiet places.

More and more, Helen found herself drawn to these corners where the worlds intersected. Drawn to the shadows and quiet places where her other world waited for her, until that one day she took a deep breath, clenched her hands and stepped through into the Shadowlands.

The Valley

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The Valley

I remember that valley
lost inside dense tangles
humid, damp, but soft
yielding inner secrets
to a gentle finger
or a soft tongue
probing possibilities
moist, glistening, warm
like a home to return to.

When it Changed

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There is a point where everything changes, when what went before belongs to an old life and what comes after belongs to a new life. It is like taking a turning on a crossroads, where the new road takes you off at an angle from the old road. You were on that old road and now, because of that moment of choice at the crossroads, you are on a new road.

It was that moment when it changed.

I looked down at him, moments before he had been alive, and now his blood was draining from his lifeless body into the dust at my feet. I looked down at the sword in my hand, feeling the sudden weight of it. Moments before, when the body at my feet still lived, that sword had felt light, almost non-existent, an extension of my arm that was itself an extension of my intention, just as I'd been taught.

I felt the weight of a heavy hand on my shoulder and I turned.

'You did well,' Yondrel spoke softly.

'Y... you taught me well.' My voice came from some new place, as though in that moment between my opponent’s life and his death I'd moved sideways into some new world. When I'd dodged to avoid his blow, and instinctively responded with my own blow, something changed inside me. That blow, my instinctive response, killed him. His blood dripped off my blade as I held it up to see the bright spring sunlight glint off the blade.

'It is always strange... the first one.' Yondrel took the sword from my hand, knelt down to the body and wiped the blade clean on a loose scrap of the soldier's tunic. He sighed as he stood up and handed me back my sword. I could see the age in him.

'Does it get any easier?' My mouth felt dry as though I was the one who'd lost all the moisture from my body.

Yondrel shook his head and led me away, back to where our horses waited, sunning themselves in the sudden spring sun and tasting the sweet new grass.

The Possibilities of Stories

She had those secret moments that turned her inside herself and away from the world she lived in. It was as if her interior world, the world of dreams and possibilities, became more real to her than this grey shadow we trudge through going about our daily lives.

Her world was full of colour and roads that led to all kinds of wonders. It was a place where the possibilities of stories came true. It was a place where myth and legend became as real as the pulse of blood through her veins and beating in her heart. It was the place where she was truly alive.

All the people who knew her: her friends, work colleagues, even those she met on a daily basis, all knew she held some secret deep within her that no-one else could ever discover. The assistant at the coffee shop always had her order ready for her as he looked forward to her arrival each morning. Even though he tried to delay her leaving, he could never find a way through to her secret world. Some thought she had the deep tragedy of a long-lost love she could not forget, others though of some overwhelming personal tragedy she could not move on from.

None of them, not one of them, no-one knew what it was that kept her distant from them, what it was that kept her apart. She was the woman of mysterious deep secrets, at least until the day the stranger came along and shattered her world apart.