Lucy had wanted a dog ever since she couldn't pronounce it, though her father refused to countenance the idea. "What about one of your mother's cats?" he asked, but the colony of Gillian's Egyptian Maus were mostly feral and generally resistant to the concept of pink bows tied to their tails. Thankfully, the scratches bled profusely , thus washing the wounds. "I know," he said, drying her tears with a tissue, "you can have Profits." He vanished into the attic for ten minutes and emerged with a…
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Added by Rachel Green on April 7, 2010 at 7:56am —
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Madame le Pardo offered tea-leaf fortunes from a little tent
outside the cricket pavilion and for an undisclosed sum (it was illegal
to tell fortunes for money but you were encouraged to give a gift) she
would tell your future. Her method differed from the carnival lot, for
in addition to the customary wet leaves she would prick your thumb with
a needle and squeeze out three drops of rich, red life. He predictions
would then be frighteningly detailed. "
You'll… Continue
Added by Rachel Green on February 9, 2010 at 1:42pm —
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I’ve heard of white horses on the edge of the tide but a sandy beach covered in white kittens was new to me. There must have been several hundred, all meowing piteously and lucking for homes. It was the latest ruse by the shapeshifting aliens of Praxis VI but they didn’t do their homework. Their plan was doomed to failure because they were too proud to log into google and monitor the population demographics. Not one was adopted from the Hartlepool with its history of hanging monkeys. They…
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Added by Rachel Green on March 19, 2009 at 2:59pm —
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In the window is a display of old almanacs dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Only in the last ten or fifteen years has the design changed significantly. The early ones are a riot of the engraver’s art, their covers promising the wonders within. The latest ones are nondescript – fragments of clipart arranged with 8-bit typefaces. Where is Arnold Bocklin when you need him most? Off with the Tarot readers.
Added by Rachel Green on March 18, 2009 at 6:56am —
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She drives from Pontefract to give me the draft copy of my book back. It was destined to be the third book but the strength of the plot promotes it. Pages are highlighted with corrections but few of them involve heavy editing. My characters sigh, their hopes of extended stimulating dashed with the list of typos and misplaced commas and I am relieved to note the lack of grocer’s apostrophes – perhaps I am not such a bad grammarian after all. We chat about the plot over a cup of tea and decide to…
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Added by Rachel Green on March 16, 2009 at 1:12pm —
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It was a botched boob job that drove Mandy over the edge. She’d gone in for a reduction from her JJ cup size down to a comfortable C. “They’ll settle down,” the doctor said when the bandages came off, “you’ll see.” Mandy waited three months, then six, then a year but they still looked like two googly eyes with the nipples pointing in opposite directions. The NHS refused to fund another operation, deeming the re-alignment of her nipples to be ‘purely cosmetic’, despite their influence on her…
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Added by Rachel Green on March 15, 2009 at 9:46am —
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Breathless, she opens the door of number 28, pushing past her mother in the hallway and arriving, still with the night air clinging to her coat, at the table where her father has his accounts spread out. He looks up, the glasses he holds but never wears falling to the crisp white linen cloth. “Alison?” he says turning, his mouth an ‘O’ of confusion, “what brings you here so late?” She plunges a steak knife deep into his stomach and draws it upward until it’s stopped by the sternum. Her father…
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Added by Rachel Green on March 12, 2009 at 2:15pm —
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The Morris dancer scowled. His black face was painted in traditional fashion to prevent the people he begged from guessing his identity. Dancing was one thing, after all, and begging was generally rewarded with a free dinner in prison. He banged Jasfoup on the head with an inflated bladder. “Tuppence?” he said. “This isn’t 1930.”
Added by Rachel Green on February 25, 2009 at 8:20am —
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The chap in number six was crazy. “It was a werewolf,” he shouted to all and sundry. “A werewolf and a vampire and a ghost, all livin’ in an ‘ouse together.” Sergeant Brockwell rapped his nightstick on the cell door to shut the prisoner up – he was beginning to disturb the other prisoners and a Sunday night riot was the last thing anybody wanted. “He’s been watching too much of that ‘Being Human’ they’ve been showing on the BBC,” he said, thinking of the package in his locker. A leg of mutton,…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 24, 2009 at 8:10am —
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How sweet to be an angel amongst the white, fluffy world of Heaven, where all one does is sing the praises of God. And dance, of course, and play lyres. You’d think that after six thousand years they’d have started to find the endless plink-plink-plink a little tedious and brought out a mandolin, perhaps, or a viola, or a bass guitar. God forbid anyone be so imaginative as to pull a trumpet out of their hassock, or a saxophone. A bit of New Orleans Jazz would make Heaven a pretty swell place to…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 22, 2009 at 1:56pm —
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Jasfoup saw the ghost of Edward Edwards before the young man died. He thought little of it until, after the ghost had followed him for several hours, he inquired of the spirit’s purpose. The exchange of a contract signed in ectoplasm for the young man to wake from a coma left the demon free to enjoy the opera. At the hospital, Edward’s sudden recovery and healing of thirty-four broken bones was hailed as a miracle and drew in dozens of pilgrims from all over the world. Jasfoup was pleased.…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 21, 2009 at 12:34pm —
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There were gherkins in the blackcurrant preserve. Quite how they had arrived there was anybody’s guess, though Inspector White had a suspicion it was something to do with the settings of his PDA. He’d been in a pickle with it ever since it he’d tried to jam the screensaver to stop it coming on every time he picked it up. Trying to text the problem to his tech-savvy son had been inadvisable in the magical field of Laverstone. Whoever said that magic and technology didn’t mix was right. He was…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 20, 2009 at 10:28am —
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Arnold Crabtree held the bottle between two palms and unscrewed the lid with his teeth. The clean scent of witch hazel filled the room and Arnold poured some out. He put the bottle down, rubbing his hands in the balm to ease his swollen fingers and gain a measure of relief. The doctors said he was lucky not to have gone into anaphylactic shock but they didn’t have that when he grew up. All Arnold got was a double handful of agony. That was the last time he’d believe Tommy Blesset when he said…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 19, 2009 at 10:52am —
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Vanity was not something Lucy was overly concerned about. In fact, if not for her unruly hair she would be content to live without a mirror in her room at all. She’d seen pictures of her mother – a painting anyway – who had been possessed of a classic beauty but for her shadow-black tresses which Lucy had inherited along with the glittering eyes. Alas that she’d also got her father’s pug-like nose and receding jawline, neither of which sat well against her grandmother’s elfin features and olive…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 19, 2009 at 8:27am —
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There was a point to Chaos, Lucifer mused, it was what kept you from going stale. It’s all very well to say that infinite things were possible in an infinite void but eventually even a god ran out of ideas. Look at the huge number of fir trees, for example. God had got really stuck on fir trees to the point where sixty varieties all looked identical but for a slight change in leaf pattern. Far better to kick a bucket of chaos over and see what was left after the biggest lumps were cleared away.…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 18, 2009 at 12:25pm —
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You know how brothers bicker when they’re growing up? All children do it but brothers especially Imagine you had six brothers and they all did their chores as their father bade them, day in, day out with never an argument, each of the six telling their father how wonderful he was and how much they loved him until one day the eldest says: “Dad: didn’t you say I was the fairest of us?” And dad says ‘Yes, you are.” You can just see that causing trouble, right? Say hello to Lucifer and his six…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 13, 2009 at 8:10am —
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Saturday morning in Laverstone Post Office is always slow until about eleven – they close at 12:15 and 11:00 is about when people generally stagger in after a late Friday night. Harold and I, posting off the week’s internet sales of books from his shop, generally arrive at noon. Mrs. Travis is always pleased to see us: not only do we give her a nice boost to the week’s profit and loss ledger but we take the time to be pleasant and Harold generally passes along a book or two he thinks she’ll…
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Added by Rachel Green on February 8, 2009 at 7:27am —
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The light was split into prismatic shafts as it entered the kitchen – red to the cooker, yellow to the breakfast bar, green to the terrarium and so on. It didn’t bother Elizabeth that the red shaft was no where near the orange or the green several yards from the blue. Colours only ever went where she wanted them to go. Other people didn’t seem to realise a shaft of monochromatic light could be directed by will alone. “What about ultraviolet?” someone asked over tea and biscuits. Elizabeth just…
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Added by Rachel Green on January 27, 2009 at 11:33am —
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At one second past midnight, on January the first, 2009, the world ended. It ended not with a bang, but with the hiss of escaping air as the ozone layer finally expired. The first of the celebratory rockets, released three seconds prematurely, had knocked out the last hastily applied piece of sticky-backed plastic that Abdiel had spent seven hours up a 1500 foot ladder plastering on. The humans died instantly, along with all the mammals and birds. Amphibians and fish, and the myriad of other…
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Added by Rachel Green on December 31, 2008 at 7:58am —
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My husband objected to the post-it notes. It wasn’t the impact to the environment (I used eco-friendly ones at almost four times the price), nor the nails banged in the wall to run strings across to represent plot and sub plots (we could hang pictures off them afterwards) but the sheer size of it. An average 100K novel would run to fifty or sixty chapters, each containing between one and twelve post-its. ‘This has to stop,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to look at the mess.’ This is why I now write in…
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Added by Rachel Green on December 30, 2008 at 8:30am —
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