D. F. Lewis

FONDUE The atlas lay open in front of me as I riffled through its pages, peering at the strange shapes of the land masses as created by Nature, and they were staring back at me with wiggly edges to their whites, blues, browns and veins of red in their eyes. Yet there was very little green. Were these maps of the future, I wondered, as I began to focus my attention on certain of them, while looking for their names. And why were the veins red, not blue, for example — as I expected rivers to be depicted in blue. There were smudges and smears of blue, though, as various shades of sea, ultramarine being a colour that I had somehow heard of, but here it was not so much ultra as faded. Later, I found more swirls of red whereby I imagined...

GIRL POWER When I met Abel Martin, I had no idea whom or exactly what I was meeting! He was difficult to describe, even then, so I won’t even attempt to do so now. A bit of a cop out, I guess. Suffice to say, I found him off-putting and I wondered why this meeting had been set up for me by my employer. Just to explain — I had recently been appointed as the Transition Manager in a large motor vehicle outfit, half owned by the Japanese. Who owned the other half was a bit of a mystery, and I’d better not speculate about it here. But, yes, that’s right, the Transition in question was from petrol and diesel to electric, to cater for today’s warming dangers. All firms were facing this situation, but I think I was the only such Transition...

The wave was huge, a tsunami of humani, each with its hand raised and wavering in unison. They told me to watch out for any of the many wavering out of tune, so that each could then be picked out, taken out and dealt with. Kissing as the art of marking victims. That was my job. One of them, I saw, a young woman about my own age, was seen to be deliberately wavering out of synchronicity. You could not tell this clearly, but I was practised in recognising such rebels, and I went up to her and, before she could respond, I kissed her gently on the mouth, and then the invisible officials soon came out of hiding and roughly took her away. In many ways, a kiss is a sign of love, making any exit from the wave easier, insulating the pain with...

There were five kids in the gang. The oldest, being twice the age of the youngest, assumed command as soon as he was able to talk; a short-shinned lad with horizontally striped tie of far longer narrowtongue than wide kipper front. His name was Idle White. Just a year back in the queue for death was Treff, a drop-arse lad in shabby dungarees and a lolly-stick always between his thin lips (and, when he got old, people wondered if he’d got his pipe the wrong way round), and eyes of smoky gray… …followed by three urchin girls, Loosey, Dolly and Daff, with metal gray, unpleated skirts run up decades ago by their grannies on treadle sewing-machines, the frayed hems hanging below their knobbly knees . . . red-blackened socks circumcised to...

ELEPHANTS & MONKEYS Too many reasons not to take my grandson to the zoo. He did not want to go, I did not want to go, and when we got there, it was shut. Apparently, some disease or misfunction had hit many of the animals. Yet the disappointment should not have been an issue, and we were only there because his grandmother, my wife, had insisted. She wanted us male bristles out of her hair, in other words. Nevertheless, he started to cry when we saw the notice on the turnstile.... “I want to see the elephants and monkeys,” he squalled repeatedly. “No point in wanting that,” I said, “as nobody is going to let us in. Better find somewhere else to go.” At that point, a face showed up at the turnstile. A wide moonface, with a zoo cap...

I imagined a couple of old people, who had lived a life of experience, a life of having their own children, now faced with a granddaughter, eight years old, a granddaughter they had not been told existed till now. But how could they say they knew how to bring up children if their own children had kept this secret from them? Good well-bred sons and daughters would not have such secrets from those who had borne and bred them, surely. But if there was one eight year old grandchild, there may be others of different ages. Different ages, within reason. Within the reason of sane numbers in a generation. But I also imagine that this so-called granddaughter of the old couple might be the tip of an iceberg. Thousands of eight year olds waiting...

The large rock-like stone David had prised from the ground along with the intractable root of the once gnarled apple tree looked like a grey joint of beef. After placing it with self-consciously aesthetic rockery intentions at the foot of a pruned-back peach tree trunk, he speculated on how his own skull’s contents would eventually shrivel and its bony carapace crumble, long before that rocky stone had even lost its memory of forming an integral part of the earth – once organic as man himself and composite as opposite poles. The struggle he had imposed on himself as well as on the tree root felt as if it had been one with the very planet: a David and Goliath contest to beat all such ill-matched contests. Yet, that particular historic...

‘A Symphony in Three Movements’ There was no doubt in my mind that I was being stalked — and this was by a creature which, if it had been human, I would have, at all costs, tried to throw off my trail at the first opportunity. There is nothing worse than someone who seeks an essence of hope from you for their own use while following you from street to street even as they try to seek attention from you beyond their initial attempt to converse on subjects with which you cannot at all sensibly engage. Even worse, when you cold-shoulder them, they continue to hang at a greater distance from you but still visible in pursuit of engaging you in conversation and feeding off your positive attitude to life. The very worst, however, is when...

Based on last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Clacton writer’s group... The crew of them came for me. They somehow told me that their on-going job was to cast a net for everyone who was celebrating their 70th Birthday. I looked them straight in the empty eye sockets and asked how they knew I was 70 today? One of them clicked and rattled and shook its jaws like castanets, as if it knew something I didn’t know. A sound and look that patronised me, a supercilious attitude of superiority over a mere human being like me who was still alive, if barely so at my advanced age, an age that had advanced one ratchet of years that very day. Without further delay, the crew gathered around, one of them hauling me up by the armpits upon bony...

She always fancied herself as a female version of Sherlock Holmes, not Miss Marple so much as a tall, willowy brunette with jodhpurs, whip and meerschaum pipe. And, of course, deerstalker. Always there even if never there. That was her self-image, and I dare not describe her for real, in fear of misrepresenting any woman’s shape and size. These days such characteristics are taken as read, inferred not expressed or exposed. Men of all shapes and sizes and degrees of ugliness are fully possible, however. Fiction should be on the side of truth. Reality has no respect for its own repercussions. Fantasy is for fun-lovers who live dangerously. So, we shall work with her objective image rather any competing subjective one. We shall start with...

This was not about the terrible disease from which old men have often suffered. This was the only story where the Famous Five children and those from Swallows and Amazons appeared together and declared war in support of their own author, Enid Blyton children versus Arthur Ransome children, taking place in the ‘secret water’ of Walton on the Naze when the 1950s were truly the 1950s and not an excuse for some monochrome nostalgia about such an era. Julian, George, Dick and Anne versus Nancy, Bridget, Titty and co., with boats bobbing and weaving between the tall shrimping sheds. But there was very little engagement of forces as each character gradually meandered off to do their own thing, either singly or in pairs. Sometimes...

Writing words to mean something or mindlessly drawing them. Read this or view this and see. ‘One all’ is a funny expression, is it not? It might be a score draw, it might be a way of saying you were quits with someone regarding a dispute, it might also be about winning a whole war where if you won one battle you ‘won all’ future such battles that now no longer needed to be fought. I suppose that is what this is all about. Not the score draw where you win one battle each, one goal each, as it were. Not coming to an agreement with someone without any battle at all, where the war did not even begin, as one of you gave in on one crucial point and then the other one of you gave in on a different crucial point, at which moment of agreement...

The Stood Bedroom was a single story. Standalone, a bedroom house, a house with only a bedroom, and four exterior walls and two windows halfway up or halfway down as formed by corners like sharp, right-angled bays, with curtains inside to match and pull in different directions from halfway across. Commonly called a Stood Bedroom. Inside, it was indeed a bedroom with no sign of its doubling as a bedsit for the purpose of entertaining guests. Meanwhile, it was only guests who knew that there was a whole catacomb of rooms beneath this single bedroom, with stairs leading down to them, and thus such extra rooms were naturally below ground level. Kitchen, bathroom, sitting-room, even a hall and a music room, but, of course, no sun lounge nor...

The man wearing an eye-patch stared at me. The white of his single visible eye was strangely clear to see from where I was standing. It was riddled with red wriggling thread-worms. Its pupil seemed to be a grey weeping pustule or the leading edge of something that I imagined to be knotted brain extruding from further back in the skull. The eye was ringed by hardened ridges of blackened flesh which gradually became pinker the further such ridges reached from the eye socket itself. Because of my startlement at this sight of the man’s “good" eye, I was really prevented from noticing much about the rest of him. The distance didn’t help much, either. But I found myself wondering that if this eye was visible and open to sight, what possibly...

The West End was teeming with people, some with heads that stood out from the crowd, heads with large defined faces, upon taller bodies than most. The rest faded into their own background, individuals, some so small they must have been infants, others so thin they vanished behind lampposts, some others so fat they were too wide to make out that they were people at all, difficult to differentiate them from the the amorphous masses of their own rain-sodden coats, more like mammoths or whales than people. Yet others indistinguishable from old lace. Meanwhile, one of those with a big defined face pointed to one of the theatres with which this part of London was crammed side by side, a theatre with signs and colliding lights, showing...

“Do you see that young man again, Wendy?” “Was he the one who we saw about ten minutes ago? You called him Peter, didn’t you, after the man’s name on this bench? Dead now ten years? See, yes, ten years ago. Rest in Peace: Peter Glidder ... 1961 to 2008. You called him Peter something-else, didn’t you, as the name of that young man who just passed by here. I wonder where he’s going? He looked lost, didn’t he?” “Too young for the likes of us, Wendy. I reckon he was born at least sixty years after we were.” “Ooh, I could still do with him in my bed. Tee hee.” “Oh, you’re awful. By the way, what’s he doing. He’s looking at us in very peculiar way, isn’t he?” “He’s just put his hand in his pocket. Why is he wearing gloves on such a warm...

The grizzled cove came into town under his chimney hat. In those days, the purveyors of queer medicine rode ramshackle wagons swaying from side to side, ill-balanced between large leaning wheels, hauled by horses as small as mules. Horses that looked like giant rats from certain angles. Even his whip was as untidy as the wagon, its end frayed and with handle wrapped in stale open-pored leathery skin. He had come to sell you something you ordered via the good offices of Wells Fargo and several telegraph poles ending in his (god)forsaken warebarn near the thistly thirsty canyon. You watched his wagon teeter into view between rocks that looked as if they had been placed there by a secondary scenery crew for a black and white Tex Ritter...

It was meant to be in the roof, of course. But that was not a given, because there was no easy way to find a door upwards into its cavities. Hey Joe, the latest hit by Jimi Hendrix, was playing on Pick of the Pops when Mrs Omaha again mentioned the status of her home’s attic. “It’s gone.” “What’s gone?” I asked, knowing full well the answer to my question. Since she had reached her 70th year, she had specialised in recurrent identical statements, all of them referring to the supposed missing attic. “Let’s spend the night together.” That was not Mrs Omaha - or, me, for that matter. It was the next record being played on the wireless. It was considered to be a very naughty record in those days. I need not tell you it was by the...

Black and right, black and right, Back to night, back to night, Empty well on the left, coloured in light. What did he say? Sounded like lines from nonsense nursery rhyme verse. But does a nursery give out sounds like nonsense? Quite easily, she replied. When a nursery full of toddlers hold sway. A whole sway of tiny human beings learning to speak for the first time, speak if not talk. To talk is to interact. To speak is to hold forth as if to oneself and if anyone speaks back, so much the better. However speech as noise can impart emotions at least, he says, a sort of communication more meaningful and target-seeking than real words. Even music means things. Sheer music with no words. White and left, white and left, Hard right then...

Hannah Hannah became irritated when she was told one day – in relative middle age – that her name spelt the same backward as well as forward and she realised that she hadn’t realised this before. For ‘irritated’ please read ‘inexplicably distraught’, but that only became evident in hindsight. Then – in some bizarre method of transcending the eventual despair – she found herself frantically examining words to see how they looked backward and it soon extended towards an obsession about anagrams. She couldn’t even read words without trying to shuffle their letters in as many permutations as possible and, before long, she couldn’t read anything properly even if she skimmed the text in an attempt to override her lexicographical tics while...