kjaneway's Stories

Fog

2008-09-10T22:25:29Z

I’d woken in the first pink-grey shards of morning to the strangely peaceful sound of early morning gulls and the gentle clatter of stays against masts. Light had come, while I’d nursed a tin mug of steaming hot tea on deck.

Once the swirling tide became my friend, I slipped my moorings.

The navigation channel was narrow and weaving, but clearly marked. Tacking upstream, the previous evening, had been somewhat more challenging. As the calm voice on the radio had warned me, though, even out beyond the shelter of the river’s mouth, the wind was barely there. I was already resigned to gently motoring home. Even with all my canvas and a hanky, these light airs would have taken me nowhere. Becalmed.

Fog doesn’t make it dark, but it’s more claustrophobic than a cave. At sea, it surrounds you. Smothering everything, like cotton wool. Soaking everything, more pervasively than rain. It dissolves the world, and leaves you in a hole that only you can see.

I reached for the charts. The sea bed would guide me, today.

Three to get ready...

2008-04-11T14:57:36Z

They moved together; slowly, at first, finding the rhythm, then increasing and reinforcing it. Sweat sheened their bodies, the soft candlelight that filled the room burnishing their skin and gilding the droplets.

The blonde struggled against the bonds which kept her hands away from the redhead whose energetic tongue was raising waves of intense pleasure. The restraints, lovingly tied silk scarfs, offered a modicum of movement, but overall it was an exercise in futility.

In the armchair at the end of the bed, the brunette sat looking on her, eyes opened as wide as her legs, where her hand moved in time to the scene playing out before her on the bed.

After several moments more, during which the sounds of pleasure from the coupling on the bed increased in intensity, the brunette pushed herself up onto unsteady legs and readjusted the leather straps more securely, then moved forward to join the others on the bed.

Resting gently against the redhead’s bobbing behind, she took a deep breath and plunged forward.

Scorched Earth

2008-03-08T13:43:28Z

The ground was parched; brown and dusty under an unrelenting sun. As far as the eye could see, and that was some way over this extensive plain, nothing still lived. Charred skeletons of what had been the more substantial trees made obscene gestures at the sky, creaking and moaning eerily in the breeze.

The enemy’s retreating order had been ‘scorched earth’ and it had been carried out with devastating accuracy and attention to detail.

There would be no living off this land, he knew. No food, water, or shelter but that which they brought for themselves. He thought back to his planning, the long nights in the sweaty heat of his office on the coast. He had known this might happen and written the contingency orders himself, arguing for the budget with tight-fisted bureaucrats, ruddy cheeked from the excesses they enjoyed, who had never and never would have to march in a rough, ill-fitting tunic through the heat of a summer’s day in this hellish land.

“Make camp,” he said, wearily. “We’ll move out at dusk.”

Shivers

2008-02-12T15:23:29Z

The dull snap of polymer against skin.

She shivers slightly, hoping that no one else notices. This sound has meaning to her.

The vinyl gloves stretch less. They don’t make quite the same sharp crack that the old latex ones did, but the association is still there in her mind. Pain or pleasure will follow that noise… but she knows that sometimes pain can be its own kind of pleasure.

A calm masculine voice asks her to relax, and large gloved hands make firm, but uncaring contact with her skin, searching her dispassionately.

Today, it seems, there will be pain.

The writer

2008-02-12T15:21:43Z

The room was slightly cool. Outside, the night was clear and silvery moonlight flooding through the undrawn curtains augmented the candles dotted around the room, which provided the only other light beyond the glow from the laptop screen. The contemplative mood was enhanced by the quiet music emanating from speakers hidden somewhere in the gloom. However, all was not well.

A figure paced around the room, casting grotesque and jerky shadows in the flickering candle light. Occasionally, the pacing would cease, and the figure would make a dive for the laptop. The girl’s face resolved in the glow, bespectacled and drawn, her eyes frantically following the words that appeared on the screen in response to her fingers flying over the keyboard.

However, each time the tapping of keys would slow to a halt and, after a brief pause, the girl would leap up and continue her pacing.

The slippery slide

2008-02-11T15:13:10Z

In, out. Back, forth. Explosive relief!

......................................................

The view from (t)here

2008-02-11T15:08:35Z

Across the road, where cars and occasional lorries pass, indiscriminately hurrying from A to B.

Beyond the open air restaurant, the tables and chairs stacked haphazardly under faded awnings, awaiting the beginning of the real year. Beyond the little garage with its stained concrete forecourt laden with dead tyres.

Past even the trees and bushes that grow surprisingly greenly despite the general water shortage and the thin soil that coats the pocked limestone of this rocky shore, that forms the roots of the mountains that rise precipitously close behind.

There, in the distance, lies the sea.

Today, in the rapidly fading evening light of this early part of the year, it is a murky turquoise, fading to a thin line of deeper grey-blue, which merges into the blue-gray of the cloud filled sky. The day’s unexpected rainstorm has churned it, clouding the usually clear waters and obscuring the vegetation that lies below, and a stiff breeze ruffles the surface, leaving it tipped with splashes of bright white spume.

Six word memoirs: Love is a casualty of conflict

2008-02-11T14:51:55Z

Solider fought. Doctor died. Lovers lost.

....................................

Holiday weather

2008-02-11T14:47:46Z

Dark clouds gathered, rumbling. Rainbows arched.

..................................

The Uncertainty Principle

2008-02-07T09:34:23Z

“The fluctuations are back, sir”

The disembodied voice of his assistant pulled him away from his observations and dumped him ungently back in the realm of meatspace.

“Damn,” he said gingerly removing the immersion helmet. “Are you any closer to finding out what’s causing them? I thought we’d done a complete systems reset.”

“We did, sir.” He struggled to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. The ‘we’ who had grovelled around flicking switches and twisting dials, for ten long cycles had actually been more of a singular ‘I’. The perils of being a research assistant, he supposed, but it still irked him.

“Did we run a full diagnostic suite?”

“We did.” That had taken the other five cycles. Time for eating, sleeping, or, the deities forbid, socialising, had all been sacrificed to his desire to worship at the altar of the most illustrious historian of the current era.

Xeno-history had never been so sexy. The streams they had broadcast from the Sol 3 simulations had been some of the most accessed data bursts ever.

Door to door salesmen

2008-02-06T17:49:59Z

“There’s somebody at the door!” The chant was inane and insanely irritating. It caused him near physical pain, these days, and that was before he even opened the door.

“Good evening, sir.”

The dark suits, crisp shirts and quiet, respectful voices were decidedly not what he had been expecting. Nor the horde of youths around him, who fell suddenly silent, under the faintly malevolent gaze of the visitors. Even the bird weighing down his arm resisted his traditional attempt to attack new arrivals.

“Er… hello?”

“We were wondering,” said the first man, earnestly, “if you were aware that it was Ash Wednesday, today?”

“Ash Wed… What?!”

“The first day of Lent,” the taller, previously silent, partner explained. “It’s a day of fasting and contemplation of one’s transgressions.”

“Look, just who are you?”

“Have you been contemplating, sir?”

“No. Look, could you just go away please. You’re, er… you’re scaring the children.”

The men looked confused.

The old man, in his bright blue, coat was entirely alone.

Small potatoes

2008-02-02T08:39:11Z

The end of the world as they knew it came on a Tuesday afternoon.

Not with the apocalyptic imagery of their great-grandfathers, however. There had been no frantic, world-wide broadcasts of images of mushroom shaped clouds spreading over the great cities of the world, or huge, alien craft in the skies.

Eventually, the world was brought to its knees by a single act of well placed pressure. It could even have been accidental. The explosion itself had been small, in a relatively obscure corner of the country. That first day, there had been only a few localized fatalities. Then, without warning, it gathered momentum, and no one could reign it in.

So frightened people did what their animal brains were still trained for. They fought to survive, to be the ones who lived another day.

And so Rome burned.

When it was all done and dusted, Gregor had sat in his apartment, looking out over the rubble of the great achievements of his kind, last cold beer in hand and mused flippantly, “but I’d got the hang of Tuesdays.”

West Coast Dreaming

2008-02-01T17:17:28Z

The wide expanse of the beach was golden in places, nearer white in others. The dunes were layered with browns and reds and topped with the yellows and greens of the tenacious plants that held on against the shifting nature of their footholds and the raw power of the weather that shaped the coast.

This late afternoon, however, was calm. The retreated sea showed only minor ruffles and the pure, cornflower blue of the sky was enhanced by the streaks of cloud, rather than marred by their presence.

They sat together in comfortable silence; the pile of driftwood collected during their earlier walk at their feet, awaiting a spark. In the meantime, they waited. Waited and watched the sun sink towards the far away horizon, so wide you could practically see it curve. They watched the fierce pinks, oranges and yellows painted across the canvas of the sky, and saw them fade, first to pastels, then there was only the deep midnight blue of night.

As the first stars flickered back into existence, they lit the fire.