Live reading - Scriggler 5

This is the footage of one and a half of my stories which i read at Scriggler Live 5.

The first story "Echoes" starts halfway through - you can read the whole story here. The second story "Wings" is in its entirety.

Both stories are from my latest collection of flash fiction "Extra-Curricular" available from Amazon, I-Tunes and Createspace.



And yes, that IS a Taylor Swift ringtone going off towards the end of "Echoes". Here's my piece on how I battled her on stage

Many thanks to Dimitry Selemir of Scriggler for the video footage.

Fallen Angels - Friday Flash

Heaven had become a hive of hellish hother and pother. Everywhere the eye could range, angels with gossamer wings were scurrying hither and thither, humping armfuls of plaster of paris. Save for those angels who had toppled over and lay prostrate, unable to right themselves. The increasingly feeble splay of their wings heralding the slow extinguishing of their light, like the dying embers of a fire. These angels had revoked their immortality.

Some had curled their wings around in front of them to form a scoop with which to carry a greater volume of the plaster. If they failed to reach their destination before the gypsum hardened, the seraphim were cast solid and pitched headlong to the ground. Yet in fact any contact with the terrestrial substance unwittingly formed a granular seal on their own death warrant. Any besmirching of their diaphanous plumes with the duller clots of the plaster, would eventually set hard, thereby plucking their wings of flight and exposing them to the afflictions of gravity.

Yet still they persisted in their lethal toil. Some celestials simply poured the plaster over themselves and transformed instantly into statues. In suicide thus they became the objects of their collective endeavour. Since the angels were striving to build a terracotta army in their own likeness. Stretching back as far as the horizon and beyond. The host were trying to suggest a swelling of their own ranks to the near infinite. To confront another, oncoming swarm. Finite, but pullulatingly deadly. For mankind was on the move and seeking new pastures. After eviscerating their own terrestrial realm.

Puttos were exhorting their aerial elders to evermore effort. Tooting their long-stemmed trumpets. The very same notes that used to usher in sweet harmonies, now resounded as with the blare of a cataclysmic tocsin. Nude Cupids were firing their forlorn love arrows over the heads of their venerable peers to spur them on yonder. Yet the further down the plaster parade, the more ragged and less-angel like the sculptures appeared. In fact they looked nothing remotely more than a pillar or a termite mound. The remaining angels still feverishly trying to erect statues at this point, complained to their goading juveniles that their delicate hands were only meant for strumming harp strings. Not shaping lime that burned their skin.

Just as the Cherubs were about to remonstrate further with their patriarchs, the latter interposed by what means the humans had finally managed to locate their own ethereal plane. That sublimity which had previously provided them with their inviolability from the grossly material. How man had returned to consider their own ancient maps of earth. Festooned with Cherubs blowing trumpets propelling propitious marine winds and Puttos unfurling scrolled cartographies. Man simply gazed up from the terrestrial landmasses following the orientation of the cherubs and hence were now massed outside the empyreal gates. The Puttos and Cherubs protested that such maps also bore fearsome dragons and Gogs and Magogs. They inquired of their wise ones why the humans had not followed their abyssal trails, why they had only alighted on the celestial? The angels explained that when the humans looked at such monsters, they only saw reflections of themselves.

Irresistibly, mankind's first port of call had been Hell. It being of a more natural fit temperamentally. Imagine their self-righteous shock at being informed by Lucifer that Hell had been the original version of their own earth. Its current searing temperatures and icy inertia were what their earlier incarnations had reduced the planet to. Lucifer and his skeletal crew had been charged with maintaining the fissile core and preventing it from mimicking a supernova. Those scientists who happened to be in the van of the human hordes had been disbelieving, declaiming that no race could ever have the capacities for survival within the fearsome temperatures of a star. Mammon retorted that prototype earth was ever a planet and not a star, only how in their forebears ravenous surge, its magma had been fired up and the molten core irradiated through mankind's meddling and destabilising of the whole fabric. There had flashed  the most fleeting flicker of recognition in the faces of the scientists, for after all, similar processes had overtaken their own earth and compelled their verdict of a species-wide emigration. Their smugness swiftly wiped from their countenances, as the press of the multitude from behind impelled them into fiery pits and the abyssal chasm itself. Mankind had delivered its verdict with a casual shrug of barging shoulders and seethed onwards. They were after a superior berth than this home once spurned already. Lucifer had signalled ahead to his angelic brethren.

The Cherubs and Puttos were distraught that their own joyous annunciation and blazoning of human progress had betrayed their own kindred. And yet the humans couldn't have been as terrible as their elders lead them to believe could they? After all, consider the grotesque impressions of their own form rendered here by the angels and compare that with the bewitching pulchritude of the human depictions. No, with such art in their souls, the humans simply wouldn't pull their wings off them as they might do to lowly flies. If anyone was presenting a certain ugliness of the poetic soul, it was the angels themselves with these abominable likenesses. The callow angels turned to welcome their spiritual masters who had proven they could work miracles with base matter...

Taken from my third flash fiction collection:

Available from Amazon Kindle Store free to download 3rd-7th June 2016

While You Were Sleeping - Flash Fiction

Your first night on earth was under my eyes. Swaddled in blankets in your Moses Basket, like a tortilla wrap. Your breath so fragile, I could detect no trace of it, which served only to quicken my own throughout the long hours. Your alabaster lids so transparent, the shadow of your eyes beneath were visible. You were wholly still, save for your flinch startle reflex. What dreams could you have had, less than twenty-four hours old? Ones brought with you from my womb no doubt. Rhythmic dreams.

And somehow you soon migrated from the basket to my bed. For my ease of feeding you as much as your neediness. And how I was too terrified to go to sleep and roll my weight on top of you. So I watched you instead. My eyes accustomed themselves to the scanty light. Your dreams were now attended by little whimpers from your mouth. And I could see your chest rise and fall with your strong heart. Was I yet in your dreams, or was it only my breast? Was I glorious to you, or monstrous?

When finally you were decanted to a bed of your own, I would read you magical stories to convey you into sleep. Always I would linger by the bed and continue to marvel at your seeming contentedness. Finally retired to the bedroom next door, I never once heard you cry out in your sleep. Peaceful, agreeable dreams seemed to be the order of your night. And thereby I contented myself.

Oftentimes I snuck in under cover of night. In the guise of tooth fairy or Santa Claus. Leaving you gifts while you slept on unknowingly, yet expectant. The exchange of tooth or milk and biscuits for bulges in the stocking at the end of the bed or under your pillow. Waiting, suspending my breath until your twisting frame was positioned just right, so as to grant me access to slip the gifts under you. I am not a follower of religion, but in those moments you looked like an angel. And my soul floated up to the ceiling.

Those times when you were struck down by childhood diseases. How I maintained a tender vigil by your side. Mopping your brow with a damp cloth, trying to contain and drive down your inner heat. Catching the blocked cadences of your breath, feeling its release diverted through your mouth. Watching your pinched features as you struggled to overcome the snags and snarls of a body turned against itself in order to garner the necessary restorative sleep.

Once you disappeared off to University, I occasionally visited your room. To be confronted with the crisp lines of the untouched linen and the dry smack of cold, uninhabited air. I cocked my ear for any of the various of your pulses I had matched to my own, but now my breath lacked for its filial echo and filled my head with discordance.

Came that time when I visited you in hospital after you'd been knocked off your bike. When your arm was in plaster and held in a harness. How we joked about your involuntary salute. And that the steel armature holding it together would set off metal detectors in airports sparking shakedown searches. But it hurt you to laugh. Pushing spluttering air through mangled ribs. I could see the soreness etched across your face in spite of the analgesic deadening. In the end the pain would wear you out into an uneasy and throbbing sleep. I watched you and the years fell away as we resumed our mutual stations. Albeit until the nurses asked me to vacate the ward, since visiting time was ended.

And now it is you who sits at my bedside, though I cannot see you. I'm unclear if my eyes are open or not, but they are assuredly unseeing. My breathing too is irregular. Straining not to the pulse of my heart, but to lungs labouring out of synchronicity. Sometimes shallow breath, sometimes deeper. Trying every possible variant patterned after yours. As I try and reach out for the last time, to fall into conjunction with your stout heartbeat here and now. But I can't hear it. Are you even in here with me? I sense that you are. I think you may be holding my hand, may be softly purring words at me, but I can't tell. If you are, it is you who is awake and I am the one asleep.

I can hear one thing however. Deeply recessed in the back of my barely functioning brain. The sound of wings flapping. I always said you were an angel.