D. F. Lewis

Papa Peter’s Pokers PAPA PETER’S POKERS The words were on a sign decking the shopfront in the darkest area of town near the factory area and the dry dock. It was the only shop that I could see in a derelict covered-market, but it showed all the signs of being open for business. I wondered whether it was a shop selling only pokers, coal fire implements as well as red hot pokers planted out into deserted cliffside scrub to spread their grains. Against my better self, I looked into the cracked window and saw a truly huge mannequin dressed as a dog-collared priest holding an equally scaled-up black-and-white speckled poker. I could not help entering, while hearing a bell tinkle above me. Behind the empty counter were all manner of pokers...

Was it a dream? Yes, but I don’t want to get into the habit of miniaturising my dreams into words for you each morning after waking. Such a regular rite has the high suspicion of a chore or a self-indulgence. However, from last night I can’t seem to rid myself of the things that bowled along the road, having escaped from my enclosure. One was a machine like a small torpedo on wheels that moved as if in mayhem to become an eider duck and later to become an urchin boy who mooned up at me as if to ask: “Why you coming after me?” I gave him a shilling instead of the sixpence he was owed in advance and I watched his head bob up and down and heard him whistle as he cleaned my enclosure’s windows. The very last bit above was a lie, as I did...

A Doll’s Ghost - a story miniature to relish, I hope. THE CHRISTMAS ROOM A room dedicated to an annual Christmas season – a room not used for the rest of the year – was queer in itself. But your mansion had so many rooms it seemed a shame for someone like you – a truly Christmassy person – not to have a home with a purpose-‘built’ Christmas Room. This year, however, owing to your recent illness – one that had kept you in bed for the whole of November and December to date – many of the usual Christmas preparations had been delayed, including the refreshing of the Christmas Room itself. Gathering new twinkly decorations at the posh Department Store in Knightsbridge (they had to be new), the ordering of a ripe Turkey, the arrangements...

The use of an elbow’s backward hinge to wipe yourself properly… …and he asked you to stand … just there. So as to demonstrate what must have been meant. He claimed that was just where … well, just where a ghost had stood earlier just as he had been looking through his bedroom window straight into the blinding sun of freak weather conditions, a time of day when he often expected you to arrive, but today you had been late, and instead of you, he had witnessed just there, yes, just there, the appearance, apparition or actualisation of approach by what he could only call a ghost … the ghost. Yes, just there. He waved and pointed as he stage-managed you into position beside the bullace tree, just in front of the grinding, creaking...

A bijou house to facilitate the residing of human beings within an abode scaled-down from a sprawling stately mansion in appearance. The gardens, secret as well as open, were equally scaled down to become flower beds and plots of easy maintenance, including a tiny rockery made from beach pebbles. And a maze topiary seeming to make a toylike pattern that needed no mechanical airborne drone to fathom, merely any strollers around it. Those who lived there were not Lilliputians, but a similar size to you and me, and when we were invited to inspect, we only bent our heads at the neck very slightly to enter through the door, although its knocker seemed no bigger than my thumb. The servants who would open the door en masse gave the vague...

The lady intoned familiar nursery-rhymes with a plaintive smile. The child lifted its poppy face mock half-heartedly to the heaven of this mother’s face and stammered out: “Mummy I love you so much I love you even more than all the money in the world … plus sixpence.” There was much giggling at the in-joke’s addition of sixpence — then followed by the near religious wireless occasion of “Listen With Mother” on the BBC Home Service. Are you feeling comfortable? Then we shall begin. Once upon a time, the world was covered in houses and mansions. On each there stood a climbing-frame which was called a Roof, after its inventor’s name. There were forces normally outside our reality that fancied these Roofs as roosts. They arrived from the...

DELETED AS NOW TO BE THE TITLE STORY OF A BOOK

The parlour was so sticky, its wallpaper seemed to be sliding off, even as I watched. But for what reason the woman had put me in the parlour I did not even question—since I had not seen the rest of the mansion. She had given the impression of being in charge — not as an owner, more as a caretaker — whilst I had not yet taken the opportunity to examine the parlour. However, although I was someone normally averse to details, I did notice that the décor was decidedly choosy and chintzy — if blemished by blisters and peelings. The woman suddenly re-entered with a feather-tickler on a stick, evidently uncaring whether a visitor might be disturbed by an environment of domestic chores or a pervasive aura of mansion-pride. “Are you comfy...

Sleep had long been serialised as quagmires of broken sweat and lucid dreams. The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed. I woke with a start — with those two fleeting images: all that remained of my dream. Indeed, I usually remembered nothing of what events my sporadic sleep surrounded. But tonight was different. The darkness glowed brighter than the luminous clock beside the bed. There was a lambency filling my eyes. I was unaccountably crying — the tears acting like tiny lenses, focussing the dull shimmer upon my retinas, almost blowing the optic fuses. I felt sick. But not with food. More with an over-fill of my own saliva — welling up like clear syrup from every corner of...

Sleep’s Lost Labour SLEEP’S LOST LABOUR (revised version of a work first published in 2016) It is difficult to set the tone. I need to be mysterious, difficult even, yet my words, today, come out simpler than I want them to be. I need to bring old gods from the darker side into this relatively bright and clear world where we all live together, rubbing along as we manage to do, while carefully avoiding knowledge of such gods that would likely threaten our existence. I still wonder why I need to summon such gods from their own realms into our realms of existence knowing that they might fetch unruly disturbances, should they ever arrive. Only difficult words will suit my purpose, to set my tone, as it were. So here goes with difficult...

There are so many dreams for us to dream, before one can hope to compile the one and only dream. Any person’s dreams are merely patchwork dreams towards such an aim of universal dream, a potential shared dream, a collaborative dream, a collusive dream, indeed a co-vivid dream woven from rough drafts of dream. And when each of us wake, we should compare notes, fabricate truths from these dreams as creative fictions, and thus judge where one’s most recent dream has taken all our dreams. “Ah, yes,” said one of us, “my latest dream fits here. You can see the ends of its stitches match the stitches here, a patchwork of loose ends, once lost, now finding their mates.” Another of us looked quizzically at the speaker and announced she surely...

He then said… He then said, Life’s a bitch! I had crept into his house - a large, unglamorous unsightly pile near the motorway - hoping that the sound of the endless traffic outside would conceal my arrival. He must have sensed I was present, however, because, although he said these words seemingly to himself, it was with the full impression that he knew I was listening and that I knew he knew. I watched his side whiskers waggle, as he stiffly raised himself from the stuck rocking-chair so as to be able to turn to acknowledge my presence while ignoring my concealed absence. Because, from his standing position, he saw nothing or nobody. What he had said before saying life’s a bitch was completely unknown. He then said something else. I...

Ken Tucky did not know whether he was Christened to complete the name of an American state, but being British with no family connection there, it was to be doubted. The Tucky family either ignored the possibility or was simply ignorant of it. Ignoring something is not the same as being ignorant of it, though. Ken shrugged, with snow falling around him. He often used bluetooth sound-blocking ear-phones which induced a sense of persecution of being followed from somewhere outside his bubble or box… or more likely from within it! He ignored the snow falling. The gentle cold sprinkle on his face however induced inner thoughts of those following him perhaps being invisible and disguising their touches on his face by making him imagine...

GOLDEN DAWNS Published 'AKLO' 1992 John Bello told her that when they played noughts and crosses together she would have to wield the mistake and he the perfect circle. He even hinted that each time she engraved the intersection on the old wooden desk-slope, someone somewhere bore a natural death. For him, of course, the joining of endless curve with endless curve was tantamount to another one being born elsewhere. Why she had to carry what she considered to be a burden upon her slender shoulders, he never explained. Equally, when they were younger, he never quite chose the right words for their act of see-saw. Into the late gossamer twilights that seemed to abound during those limitless summer holidays, they would alternately...

When, today, the word ‘young’ met the word ‘old’, I knew their letters would dodge and weave, or play catch with each other whereby a mere touch meant those two letters thereafter were stuck together whoever was the one who touched first, and their order controlled by some strange hidden order from above, and then those two letters touched by a shadowy third, and so on, thereafter. And as I watched them play together, I gradually found the word they made today was sadly made. It was as if some doom impended from the same place in the sky where their order was pre-set. I normally would move closer to any of these word games in the twilight. I was tired of playing alone on a see-saw, silhouetted against the hills and sky. You see, I had...

Cake I’ve never been able to make cake. My father, however, was a dab hand at it. He always called it Welsh cake, with him being Welsh, I guess. He has passed on now to where cakes welcome new tenants onto Heaven’s hillside, cakes forever made, forever eaten, a constant cake, a cake cake, in fact. Let them eat cake, sing the angels. And God has let it be so. And there I leave him. But others of us pass onto a different hillside, a different lower case heaven, but still it’s one with constant cake, and most after-lives are tantamount to *being* cake, a perceived spirituality, one based on the faith in cake-ism. Each of us an ingredient in the great big mixing-bowl, trickled down into it as a would-be trickle-treat that some mistakenly...

Deirdre often had problems with her elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate her. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything she wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt somewhat, however, their mental machinations simulating bones grinding… 
 She was tested to the limits, unable to mention this to anyone for fear of them thinking her mad. She speculated on obtaining professional advice, but from where? A GP or a shrink? Or even a religious person of some sort? Her husband was certainly out of the question, and if you knew her husband, you would not be surprised how he would be the last person to consult. She tried googling...

A perpetual autumn before the red alert of winter, a forever amber of status quo that we hope will continue equally unchanging — yet somehow we retain a hope derived from a past awareness that winter is a temporary hibernation not a death at all, so why do some of us, at a certain age, pray that our personal autumn can stay forever? Amber has a certain sound about it as a word. So does Remember rhyming with December. And that then makes us think of November, as a sort of negative, a gap, a watershed, a hurdle to cross in our yearning for perpetuity. A firework display to celebrate Halloween just gone, a sacred eternity of remembered embers. But much within us conflicts with our own sense of duty with which we were raised as a child...

When I awoke, my customary surroundings were slightly – even imperceptibly – changed from what I remembered them to be. Not so much an alternate world or a parallel dream disguised as awaking or an onset of mild mental illness on my part (but who can be certain of that!) but rather something like a prelude to writing this. My Muse had evidently moved in the night ... just an inch there, a tweak there, a short shift of unfamiliar eyesight upwards, a slowly seeping flatulence with uncharacteristic lack of control. The wallpaper was slightly less yellow while the open bedroom window had slightly yellower curtains that breezily welcomed a sun barely too early for Winter. My wife’s voice calling me from the supposed direction of the...

DOWRY I thought they said the title was to be LOWRY. L. S. Lowry. So that’s how I started these words off. All those matchstick people in…where? Up in north England somewhere, I guess. In the days when toilets were perhaps grimmer, grimier, less efficient, perhaps not even water closets by then, in fact most of them still being ‘earth closets’. Lowry was born in 1887, I just found out. Other days, other ways. The past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley said. I spend most of my life in recent years peeing. Or perhaps too much knowledge is bad knowledge. But now I’ve started off with this embarrassing non-sequitur, I say it is probably because a bodily complaint causes it, and I do indeed complain about it a lot! I pee in the...