Red Ronnie: a little splash of Grand Guignol

Red Ronnie.

Grandma looked good in her widow weeds.

She really looked the part of an axe murderer.

She wielded that weapon like a true Viking.

Red Ronnie was getting the chop:

Red ‘coz of his coxcomb, Ronnie ‘coz of Ronnie Corbett,

the gruff and portly other half of ‘The Two Ronnies’

we used to watch Friday nights.

Wham! Down it came.

Ronnie took off around the yard as though looking for his head, crashing into things

‘coz it’s sort of hard without yr eyes.

We ate Ronnie at Xmas.

*pic courtesy of pinterest

Furrow in the Head

I drove past the Snack Bar the other day where twenty years before I came across the boy with the furrow in his head.

He was in his early teens, with a patch over one eye and did not speak. His mate, a little older. spoke for him. They left with a few cans of coke and cigarettes.You could do that in those days.

What happened to him? I asked the shopkeeper after the two had left.

Well, he said, they were out in the shed horsing around with a speargun when it discharged. The spear shot across the room and took off part of the boy’s head.

We both went quiet for a while as the horror sank in.

I purchased my newspaper and left.

Everytime I drive past that shop …..

Stuck in the Moment

Someone once said, be in the moment otherwise you will miss your life.

I don’t know about that.

Once I was stuck in the moment.

It was like being stuck in a lift.

I was going nowhere.

Not even up and down.

There was no way out.

No alarm button to press.

No side passages to explore like in a labyrinth.

I was stuck. In the moment.

That moment when at three in the morning

the phone shrieked at us

from the hallway.

I could hear the old Minotaur lurching down the tunnels

of my brain.

I tried not to panic.

Tried smoking a cigarette

Humming a tune

Studying a fly on the wall

Studying me

Reciting my nine times tables

the alphabet back to front —

do you know how difficult that is? —

And then suddenly SNAP

I was out of it.

I don’t know how long I was in the moment.

But I did wonder if I’d ever

Get out and join

The flow of life again.

Devil of a Night

They were in a little cottage out the back with nothing to write about on a dark and stormy night. Delia, a tall, strapping, Scandinavian woman, with long greyish blond hair down to her waist, had just given them, a small group of seniors, fifteen minutes silent writing during the class on short story writing. You should be able to come up with something, she said,almost despairing of her hopelessly floundering flock. This was the second session and still not a word had been written. The thunder boomed and lightning flashed helpfully as if to provide prompts. Delia paced up and down out the front working herself into a froth.  

Just then, as if on cue, the door flew open, and a drug-addled man with straggly blond hair and  black tank top stormed in, neck and arms swathed in devil tatts,  shouting obscenities in a strange guttural language, throwing chairs around the room thankfully with no one in them, and then with his anger quenched, stormed out again. Where’s Security when you need them, fumed D who immediately phoned the police. Suddenly everyone started furiously writing. Delia could  not stop them.

pic by pretty sleepy on pixabay

The Thing in the Cage

It always come down to this: Did he see it or did he not?

Warren goes to the Children’s Hospital to see his daughter who’s been run over by a car only he gets lost in the maze of corridors. He panics, opens doors at random, many without signs. That’s when he sees it, the thing in the cage. It’s humanoid, hairy,stands upright and rattles the iron bars. It looks him in the eye. A stricken, get-me-out-of-here look. Warren is horrified. What is it doing in this big white room? In a Children’s Hospital? Warren backs off, fumbles for the door handle, and races out, down the corridor, any corridor that leads to the light. What had he seen? Was it an experiment?  Was it top secret? Had he seen something forbidden? He retches for air.

When he steadies himself, he goes back to Reception, makes sure of directions this time and finds his daughter. He does not say anything about what he has seen. He knows he has seen something he should not have seen. Or maybe he had seen nothing at all. Frenzied phantasmagoria.  He keeps quiet. He talks to his daughter about home, about how she is, about when she is coming home. They talk and talk and talk and he holds her closely. .

Hittites

You jerk

awake

black thoughts

scuttle across

the floorboards

of yr brain

little

armour-plated

Hittites,

the cockroaches

of yr mind

• photo by Hermes Rivera from Unsplash

… back to the start

I’ve been wandering a little

My ego’s so brittle

My plasma is coming apart

It’s so debilitating

When you’re disintegrating

I’m going back to the start

Rumble: Flash Fiction

We were holed up under the same roof, two people who couldn’t stand each other. And we had the whole night to spend in the same one bedroom flat. I took the lounge, she took the bed; we didn’t even say goodnight. We were murderous to each other. I could feel the old Minotaur in the labyrinth of my brain, gearing up for a rumble. But there could have been blood. Pray, I say, pray, don’t let her taunt me. I was scared of myself more than her. The Minotaur was raging. Just then the door opened

He Laughed Loudly

He laughed loudly.

A door closed behind him.

He laughed a little more loudly still.

Another door closed behind him. Slammed!

He continued. He chortled. He guffawed. He jeered.

A text message came through.

“Will you STOP laughing, please? You’re annoying me.”

No, he said to himself. No. It’s my evening and I’ll laugh if I want to.

And he laughed even more loudly.

The walls themselves laughed loudly too, splitting their sides.

The cross-eyed cat doubled up with laughter.

A door opened quietly behind him.

The man was too busy laughing to notice.

The cord tightened around his throat.

This was no laughing matter.

Stalks

Tyson was a book worm. He burrowed into books, into their worlds where, if he was allowed, he would wander for hours in their dreamy, eerie landscapes. But he would forget things. He would forget where he left his slippers, his school bag, the present he received from Aunty May [ which wasn’t a book] for his birthday. Honestly, his exasperated mother would say, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on. How silly, thought Tyson but the next morning when he went to clean his teeth, he looked up. A pair of eyes on stalks starred back at him from the mirror.