D. F. Lewis

The flower shop was not called a florist for some reason. The meat shop was euphemistically just that, although men in aprons with axes worked brutally in the back room. The medicine shop had large wholly decorative bottles of coloured liquid in its front window. The clothes shop boasted still-life mannequins galore. The seaside town of Tantton seemed neither in the past nor in the future. And its learning place ever thrived with fresh little ones to stock its desks. And other people arrived from outside called day trippers who still fell over themselves to come and see Tanntton’s sights. A shame most of them, though, arrived accompanied by awful barking shapes on temporary leads. The Tantton man called Arthur, who ran a food...

Del Shannon inserted the A into the title before he sang his song and, once sung, sung again. And as Phoebe remembered the grooves of the disc flattening onto the revolving mat having fallen from the height of the autochanger’s elbow, she already hummed the organ’s solo interlude. Phoebe herself was the ultimate runaway, she felt, as she watched a simulation of an aircraft on the screen, a futuristic vehicle about to leave its own earthen grooves for the open skies. She threw herself open to the projection of self into a cockpit specially designed for those pilots who had not been taught how to control the dashboard properly. To be responsible for those souls aboard was a thought too far, as she shrunk back into her head, but any means...

Victorian kids were often said to have such a ‘ragged bottom’, as did kids even up to the 1950s just after the Second World War. Today, their bottoms are perhaps even more ragged making accounting-system columns in food banks as well as real banks even more unsure, wavering with double lines of figures broken in different places. The typesetting term with the same name, however, prevails separately. What is certain, meanwhile, is that the term ‘ragged bottom’ refers to the clothes on a bottom, not the bottom itself. Mothers, these days, sadly, are no longer seamsters, let alone tailors. Victorian writers often used the term ‘ragged bottoms’ for waifs and strays, but the famous novel ‘Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’ of Robert Tressel...

Henry Balfour did not have four feet but he sometimes thought he had four legs. Hands served as extra feet as he crawled across the carpet ‘on all fours’, as the saying goes, between his dolls house and toy military fortress. Each day he had to make a choice of which structure he would play with most, but the imagination he needed to grant realism to his games with either of them remained the same. Projecting versions of himself to inhabit the tiny human models of those who thus inhabited the structures around them. His mother seemed to understand his so-called behaviour, but his father failed to do so. A father who wore the fashionable brown brogues of the age. A man who was missing most days while conducting unknown business...

THE WATER STRIDER When rivers widen beyond ken they call them broads, do they not? Islands of land and islands of water. Isthmuses between. Tom was certain he would be able explore every diversion of route within the area where he had chosen for a trip in a single-steered craft, a certainty that had endured until he was already three miles up a branch of the broads at the point when he realised he had gone off any map he could find in the pack of dog-eared charts given to him at the towpath station or even on-line, an on-line signal that was now significantly fading just as he was off line in more ways than one. He hummed a self-composed song to himself which he had entitled ‘when rivers widen’ and contained a reference to certain...

At what possible junction of truth and fiction could that river have been called deep? It had flowed past my boyhood home for longer than I care to remember or indeed CAN remember. They say memory only starts at the age of two and half. But I guess that differs from person to person. My memory was slightly before that — a vision of my grandmother in a black apron about to give me a bath, when my mother was in hospital. It was the black colour that pervaded all the other details that a painter would have meticulously added to the main blob of black. The painter would have got the lighting just right and the bathroom cabinet just to the left, and the sound of the river flowing past. There ARE sounds in paintings, if the painter is clever...

It all started at tea break time when the group automatically shut down for a short while. Frank had been staring at me throughout the whole first half and I wondered what he had seen in me. We were both new members of the group that entered itself on matters that I will not mention here as that would spoil your enjoyment of what I wanted to tell you. Talking about the group and its raison d’être always made me long-winded. Even as a new member, I had plenty of preconceptions and plenty of things to say about its mission statement. Well, to cut a long story into a more short-winded slice of life, Frank approached me during the tea break and whispered in my ear, “Let’s go for a short walk while the others make small talk.” I was of...

It was as if something actually did … for once. A small hand grasping for nothing, but nevertheless it was a real hand doing it. The moment felt sacred, even though it was just as easy to use the word ‘scared’. Was the sole witness scared or were the gestures of the hand having come from nothing indicating its own fear? But why was the witness’s first, if fleeting, impression that of the hand being sacred. Almost a religious act or a blessing, even a warning of greater things to come. Or a call for help to be rescued from a place that was the opposite of Heaven, a place that the witness dared not mention by name. The witness looked around to see who else had noticed. But, of course, the witness was surrounded by nothing. The witness...

NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING Because Nothing was ever what was there before And what was there before ever ends up as Nothing We shall trouble you no more Truths can only be said once Otherwise they are taken for granted And Truths that come from Nothing have haunted The rest of us forever until we also came to Nothing These words were written on the side of the stable that Owen had owned, and Owen’s son peered further beyond the stable towards the broken down house where he had not yet dared enter, something he had recently inherited and where he had spent his boyhood but never returned till now after a lifetime of marriage and his own children and state business abroad. He turned back and frowned. He could not recognise the...

Write a funeral poem This was the instruction ringing in my ears as I watched the sea take on shades of subtle green. A sea seen against an overgrown thistle with purple-spiked heads. I turned to see who had triggered the initial instruction, but in the dying light, all I could make out was a dark shape that slouched off in the direction of my own home. And this fact seemed to liberate me to walk further, even during approaching night, down to the sea where the sounds of breeze were part of the changing shades of colour working their own language for me in the direction of the poem that had been required. Not so much seeing readable words but more seeing the aforementioned shades moving across a blank page — or were they moving across...

On the shop counter were rods of several sizes. Tubes with the middles filled in. Some covered in paper like Trebor Mints. Some with a metal finish. Others that had a look of wood about them. Ranging from half inch diameter to three inches. They were kept from rolling about by two prismatic rods at either end with flat bases, the only rods that weren’t round in cross-section. The man selling these rods wore a brown overall, half-moon spectacles and he seemed to spend most of each long day pressing hard with a biro on a pad interleaved with sheets of purple carbon-paper. He only stopped this activity at the odd moments when the shop-door opened with a ting-a-ling-a-ling. About one customer every two hours. Despite the aura of calm, upon...

TWO VIGNETTES ****************** RED HATS Why they call people with ginger hair redheads I have no idea. I suppose the expression ‘redhead’ predates the invention of the word ‘orange’ to describe the orange colour. So, is ‘red’ older? And did it previously cover other colours that approximated red and now are called something else with their own adopted disciples of colour variations eager to emerge and be given their own name. Each colour as parent colour subsequently with its own disciples of colours that were a shade or two away from such a parent colour? And they all eventually have their own names, I guessed, as I watched, over the years, my redhead friend pass from ginger to grey during the course of her life, which begged the...

A voice in the wilderness - the writer studied this expression with which the writer was faced. If a voice was in the wilderness, did that not imply that there was nobody else about, and if so, how could such a voice be heard for anyone to address such a topic, without destroying the wilderness itself by their own presence in it. So, the writer crawled surreptitiously on all fours towards the outer edge of the wilderness, testing each grasp and grapple forward, to see if they had passed through a no-man’s-land and then across an even more human-empty tranche of ground where there could never be a voice that existed unless there was anyone potentially able to use such a voice to prove the writer wrong, and the writer strained their neck...

You somehow expect yourself to be already sitting there as part of the ritual of your own ablutions, a double of yourself starting the process before the real you arrives to attend to such a natural urge. This seems to be an out-of-body experience especially when you believe you are dreaming that you are doing what you see you are doing or, more likely, you are beset by a pre-empting ghost that should need no bodily ablutions at all but, by this means, it is trying desperately to return to carnal existence by mimicking your ablutions even before you reached the space it is already occupying, as if it can read the future or return from the dead to ambush your time in the tiled necessarium. I had one such dream last night, and it all...

YOURS I have long been my own version of the Sandman combing the byways of beaches — and whatever I found I have found it in the form of what I called Find Art, because, although now found, I still needed to find the actual art latent within it by cropping to size both the image and my mind, all the while trying to summon the Happenstantial Powers-that-be to configure induced pareidolia from whatever-it-was to whatever-it-will-become simply by someone like me photographing it for others to experience. Cropping the image smaller, while uncropping my mind bigger. But that was until something else happened today, a query, a quandary, an old-fashioned look, a frown, a perceived prod, even a doubt bordering on certainty in a different...

I claim it is part of everything to be its own whole. The person implied by ‘me’ is more universal than anything you can put between definition-buffers. Johnno looked up at the chimney and sighed deeply, and wondered if his brushes would reach up that far, as the flue looked as if it might be the longest flue in the world. Once inside, joint by joint he inserted each metal rod into the next one up, feeding upward the whole thing half by half by half into the narrow conduit that seemed clogged with fresh soot despite there having been no fire lit at its bottom hearth for at least a hundred years. No wonder the owner Mrs Kenn had called in Sweep Johnno, with her having recently heard boyish screams up the chimney during the night. Or...

“That’s what I’m looking for — slugs and trees.” I looked at him askance, this being Christmas Day. He called himself Mr Non Sequitur, as if that explained everything except a genuine eeriness in the number 249. “Stout appears in my story…” he continues meaningfully as if I would understand. He tells me he is thinking of drinking one bottle a week, after an abstinence of years. “Oh, my goodness,” he ends by saying, as if he has surprised himself. But what story is he referring to? There are no papers in front of him, only the lamplit glow of the study room revealing bits and pieces that don’t follow on, nor do they make any sense at all in the context, if that’s not saying the same thing. On the other hand, connections and coincidences...

A piece for Christmas Eve Christmas even and crisp, the light of evenings barely beginning to draw out again, curtains pulled together before they should. I left the sitting-room so that a proper guest could occupy it, each room that I occupied being in my rôle of pre-sitter, along the similar lines of some guests needing pre-tasters for their meals. What did they fear about the rooms — be it lounge, parlour, front-room or, of course, this very room for sitting in that gave it its own name? Fearless ghosts like me have been regularly sent into each room to neutralise any fearful ones! A drawing-room, meanwhile, needed specialist ghosts to act as decoys of exorcism for cruder ghosts that would otherwise have haunted it. A dining-room...

Christmas is when people recognise something seasonal is happening, all good cheer and other nonsense, but Gloria found nothing in it, except the soft candlelight competing with the carollers singing about angels upon the snowy slopes outside, and the stairs upstairs inviting her to walk, in their direction, underward to the mansion’s newly mended roof. Have you ever heard of stairs talking, making themselves heard through the clogging fibre of stair-carpet and the bracketing of stair-rods? Even the wicked candle-sticks blanched, being already fitted tightly into their own candelabra’s version of rods. And the lounge ceiling grew as pale as the ghostliness that prevailed even when the diurnal light vaguely pervaded from outside. Gloria...

They said, about the property in question, that you needed to fine-tune the senses of sound and sight to experience the shape’s presence in the property’s unlit sitting-room, let alone the senses of touch, smell and, eventually, taste. But the prime venue definitely being the sitting-room was spoken into your ear by the Voice of Legend, rather than it being the lounge, front room, parlour or even breakfast room, as the property sported all of these rooms so-called on the ground floor. Apparently, any ‘small rooms’ on any storey, or the main kitchen or the upstairs bedrooms, master or not, bathrooms, en suite or not, or attic spaces would certainly not support the presence of the shape that many had put down simply and disarmingly as a...