cemetaria

cemetaria — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:18:57 GMT

Tales of the Great Conglomeration

One: The War of Invisible Years

There is a period in the history of the Great Conglomeration that has been almost entirely obliterated from legend. It has certainly never appeared in any academic book published by the corporations of the Conglomeration, and if any naive kitten had ever asked about the peculiar twenty-year gap in the official records, he or she would have been hurriedly punished by hairball.

When the twenty Invisible Years first began, it had been almost twenty million sun-turns since the birds had last built their nests in the Valley of the Trees. You see, the coming of the Great Conglomeration of Cats had, quite decisively, driven them out, and those rare few who stayed in the Valley soon fell prey to the elaborate feasts of the more aristocratic cats. It did not take long after that for the sky to become empty and for the clouds to feel lonely.

Feeble-feather-beak had never meant to start the War of Invisible Years. In fact, it is an odd feat of history that he even survived to do so at all. You see, Feeble-feather-beak, already the weakest of his tribe, had fallen from the nest less than four days after hatching, and been abandoned to the whim of nature. By the normal rights of nature it is fair to say that he should not have been around at all.

Upon inadvertently escaping the confines of the nest, Feeble-feather-beak found himself woefully unable to fly. Instead, he tripped and flittered across the forest floor, until he came upon Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth, who invited him in for a slice of the best quality cheese.

Though hungry, Feeble-feather-beak was not at all impressed by the cheese. When he requested fresh worm instead, Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth made a sarcastic vomiting noise and then laughed. Feeble-feather-beak nibbled away the rest of his fancy foreign cheese in struggling silence. After a few moments, Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth asked Feeble-feather-beak why he couldn’t fly.

The young bird confessed he did not know.

Another long moment passed, and then Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth offered to teach him how.
Feeble-feather-beak laughed so sharply that he sprayed cheese across the floor. “You,” he said, “are a mouse.”

Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth stared at Feeble-feather-beak. “So?”

“What would a mouse know of bird-flight?” Feeble-feather-beak asked.

Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth did not look up this time. Instead, he picked at a piece of cheese and muttered, “I’ve been learning.” He gestured at a tangle of sticks and fabric, which almost resembled a wing.

Feeble-feather-beak was both amused and perplexed by this. He asked why a mouse would ever need to fly.

There was a silence, again. It was a longer silence, this time, and no one was eating the cheese anymore. Then Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth pulled out a scroll from a pile in the corner. He unrolled it. “This,” he explained, “is the plan of the mice.” It was possibly the most elaborate thing that Feeble-feather-beak had ever seen – he read it twice through.
“You see,” said Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth, “if we can enter the Conglomeration from above, we can take it over from inside...”

Again Feeble-feather-beak asked why.

“They took our land,” Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth explained. “They laid claim over your land, too, but if you fly, you can help us take it back.”

“Will I get a fresh worm instead of cheese if I do?” Feeble-feather-beak asked.

Tail-and-fur-and-little-teeth, being a mouse, was technically unable to shrug, but this is, in effect, what he did. “If can you fly,” he said, “you can catch your own worm.”

Thus it was that the mice taught Feeble-feather-beak how to fly, and on the eve of midsummer-day the following year, he flew thirteen rodents into the Conglomeration of the Cats. Five of the mice were on cheese-hurling duty. The others were nibblers, making use of the cheese-hurling distraction to nibble their way through the city of cats. It was on this day – the day that Feeble-feather-beak first flew above the city - that the war began.

If you are curious (for, as I have said, the history books are hopeless on this matter), the War of Invisible Years was hard fought across the Valley. Violent cheese was exchanged with explosive hairballs, and the claws of cats were taken hostage by the mice. The war came, however, to a remarkably sudden end on an otherwise nondescript Tuesday afternoon - almost twenty years to the day after Feeble-feather-beak had dropped a mouse into the Conglomeration. An unnamed travelling-cat made a discovery, a thousand miles from home: a young man in the human kingdom had invented rat poison. The travelling-cat sold his tail in exchange for victory, and the mice fought no more.

It has been suggested in more recent years that the absence of this war in the official tales of the Great Conglomeration was the direct result of an edict, passed in haste by the young feline president at the moment of victory. It is said (in whispers), that the cats were so embarrassed by the whole mouse debacle that they chose instead to deny it had ever happened at all.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

Tales from the Twin Glass Cities:
On the Bridge, by Beldar | The Straw that Stirs the Drink

Tales from the Storybooks:
Not a needle but a drink by Frecklestars | The Bridge of Lost Stories

Tales from the Great Conglomeration:
One

cemetaria — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:50:37 GMT

The Bridge of Lost Stories

You, dear reader, from the world of free stories, may find it almost impossible to imagine the life of Amelia Gardenwood - the only daughter of the chief bridge-builder in the New Londonian Republic, where stories were forbidden. You see, until the day the Gypsies came, young Amelia had never even seen a picture of a book.

The Gypsies first arrived at the gates of the citadel on an otherwise innocuous Sunday afternoon, three weeks after Amelia’s twelfth birthday – not, of course, that Amelia had been permitted to celebrate such an occasion. The arrival of the caravans to the plains outside the city walls gave rise to a peculiarly understated disquiet – the Gypsies were the most feared of all peoples, for it was through them that the books had survived, and books were the source of all heinous things. Whispers soon crept along the cracks in the streets of the New Londonian Republic: keep your children inside, the murmuring said - beware, for the monsters have arrived.

Amelia had never been one for staying inside. The moment her father left for work (he had recently been commissioned to build a new Bridge of Sighs), Amelia began to scheme. She knew that if she clambered down the apple tree outside her father’s window, she could scuttle down the back-streets all the way to the great wall. She surmised that she was unlikely to be seen by any human eyes, but, nonetheless, she armed herself with a slingshot and a pocket of rocks - just in case. (You may or may not care to know that half-way between the window and the wall, Amelia mistook a cat for a spying boy, and shot it in the face with a pebble.)

For the first time in her life, Jay had been forbidden from entering a city. They were not intending to remain here long, her mother had said, for the people of the Republic were the most dangerous of all. Jay and her brothers were, therefore, under strict instruction to remain within the confines of the camp. This was not an edict that Jay felt particularly inclined to obey, and within hours of arriving at the forbidden city, she was creeping through the grass with an apple in one pocket and a book in the other.

Jay found the culvert by accident. Tiptoeing along the edge of the wall on a quest for the perfect reading spot, she tripped on a deceptively large tussock and landed upside-down in the well-concealed ditch. There was a moment of silence and then...

“Who are you?”

Jay swore, and then blushed. She sat up and stared through the grate. A strange face peered back at her. “Are you a savage?” Jay asked.

“No!” The face on the other side of the wall leaned back for a moment. Then it said, “I’m Amelia.”

Jay continued to stare - she had never seen such a fiercely ginger tangle of hair before now.

“Don’t you have a name?” The Amelia-face asked. Then, since Jay remained silent, she said, “Are you a Gypsy-monster?”

Jay shrugged. “I’m Jay,” she said. “And I’m not a monster if you’re not a savage.”

“What you doing here?”

“Reading.” Jay held up the book.

The Amelia-face frowned, and wrinkled her nose. “What’s that for?”

“It’s for keeping stories,” replied Jay.

Amelia leaned right up to the grate. “You can’t have stories,” she whispered. “They’ll hang you alive if you say a story here.”

Jay told Amelia not to be so utterly silly – then, after a momentary consideration, she asked whether Amelia would like to hear a tale.

Amelia shrugged, and then acquiesced.

Thus it was that Jay began to read in the city where stories were lost. She told of princesses and frogs, and of battles and love. She told a story of stray children, of gingerbread kingdoms and poisoned drinks. In a single page, she swept from the gardens of a great glass palace to the coffin of a lonely witch. When darkness fell, and Jay could no longer see the words, Amelia begged her not to stop.

“I must,” answered Jay, “but here-” She passed the book through the bars of the little drain. “Keep it.”

Amelia protested this, for the keeping of books was a hangable offence. In any case, as she told Jay, she couldn’t read.

“So learn,” Jay whispered through the culvert, “And hide it well.”

Amelia knew something about her father’s bridges – a fact that set them apart from all others. What she knew was that they were always hollow, and if you removed the correct brick, you could slip inside. She had asked her father about this once, and he had given her a complex and uninteresting explanation that related to the quality of sound when hoofbeats crossed the bridge at dawn. Amelia much preferred to think of such hollowness as a hiding-hole. It was here that Amelia hid the first book. The following morning, the gypsies had moved on. The snide street whispers turned to expressions of relief. Amelia remained silent on the matter.

It was almost exactly a year before the gypsies returned to the Republic, and when they did, Amelia crept down to the culvert with her slingshot and pebbles.

She hid the second book beside the first.

The New Bridge of Sighs stood for sixty-seven years and forty-two days before it collapsed. At the moment of the fall, an old woman had been standing beside a precariously placed brick, a book concealed in her pocket, beside a slingshot and a handful of stones. It was to be, if you are interested, the four thousandth book concealed in the bridge. The actual moment of the bridge’s death was swift and underwhelming – a fleeting rush of dust and air, and the benign rustle of a million scattered words.

The rest of the city simply walked on by.

This week's entry was written as an intersection with the wonderful and talented frecklestars.
Her piece, may be found here, and you should absolutely go and give it a read.
<3

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

Tales from the Twin Glass Cities:
On the Bridge, by Beldar | The Straw that Stirs the Drink

Tales from the Storybooks:
Not a needle but a drink by Frecklestars | The Bridge of Lost Stories

cemetaria — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:23:59 GMT

Tales from the Twin Glass Cities

The Straw that Stirs the Drink.

They came to the Stone City in the spring, during those interceding days before the creeping heat of summer had claimed victory over the lingering snow. They were known to the citizens of the Stone City only as The Newcomers: the girl with the fire-hair and the boy who walked in her shadow. Although the People of the Stone were thoroughly oblivious to the following fact, it happened that the arrival of The Newcomers marked the beginning of the Age of Glass Cities (to the significant dismay of the Stone Masons).

The girl with the fire-hair had a name, if you care to ask for it – she had been known among her own people as Princess Eleanor Del-Amrath, heiress to the throne of the recently-defunct Eastern Forest Realm. It is also important that you are aware of the following fact: she had never tasted lemonade. To the people of the Stone City, this absence of lemonade was quite unfathomable – they were, it is fair to say, lemonade connoisseurs. The perfect lemonade, they believed, was blended from the juice of twelve lemons, six heaped teaspoons of sugar, and seven well-proportioned ice cubes.

To the bewilderment of the People of the Stone, Eleanor Del-Amrath had never even seen an ice-cube.

The boy from the shadows was far coyer about both his name and his lemonade-drinking-habits (although he too had never seen such a thing). Casual observers presumed, incorrectly, that he was a servant of the young newcomer. In fact, the boy was her brother – Prince Marco Del-Amrath, once an officer in the legendary (but now defeated) Eastern Forest Cavalry.

He would never have admitted it in public, but Marco remained thoroughly unimpressed by the ice cubes, for they disagreed spectacularly with his teeth.

Unbeknownst to these two Newcomers, the Royal House of the Stone City had a very particular custom – that is (as a result of some ancient, now-forgotten transgression), the heir to the Marble Throne was duty-bound to spend a year serving lemonade in the main square. It happened, then, that the first time Eleanor and Marco tasted lemonade, they were served by Prince Joseph Polo the Third.

Joseph had never before seen a girl with fire-hair. Whilst Eleanor was exalting the great beauty of the ice-cube, Joseph was so distracted by falling in love with her that he miscounted the sugar in the next four batches of lemonade.

That very evening, Joseph followed Eleanor to an inn and asked her to dance. She refused, deeming herself too proud to dance with an ordinary man. It would be a fair observation to point out that most men would, at this point, have conceded the chase – especially since Joseph had been faced with the adamantine stare of Marco. Joseph, however, did not renounce the challenge.

The following day, Joseph requested an audience with a young woman from the Guild of Glassblowers. He told her, in quite some detail, of the young Newcomer who adored the cubes of ice. He asked the glassblower whether she might build a city from glass, which resembled the perfect ice cube.

The glassblower, enticed by the rich commission, agreed to try.

The building of the first glass city took almost forty years, but Joseph Polo the Third never lived to see its completion. Some two years after he first served the lemonade to the fire-haired girl, Joseph came to a rather messy end amidst a bloodthirsty bar brawl. Interestingly, his death occurred in the same inn where, two years previously, he had asked the Newcomer to dance.

In the hours before his death, it is said that Joseph Polo the Third took a young woman out of the city, to see the foundations of the first glass palace. No one can be certain, but rumour tells of an almost-secret kiss - shared between the crown prince and the fire-haired girl, on the plains outside the Stone City. Amongst the whispers of such idle tattle, a unanimous tale emerged – the image of a young man, who watched the kiss with fury from the shadows of the city wall. What is also clear from the books of history, however, is the strange and overpowering fact that Marco Del-Amrath was never even asked to provide an alibi for that night.

This was an intersection, written in collaboration with the brilliant beldarzfixon.
His tale, 'On The Bridge', may be found here, and I absolutely recommend that you give it a read.
<3

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

Tales from the Twin Glass Cities:
On the Bridge, by Beldar | The Straw that Stirs the Drink

cemetaria — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:59:42 GMT

The Fifth Myth of the Creation

It started as a game among the cats. In the era before the Great Conglomeration, when felines ruled the never-ending-dark, a moment of mischief occurred inside the cracks between the various Realms of Real Places. This fleeting incident of rascality, deemed insignificant by the perpetrators, is what brought about the fifth creation of the world.

The chief instigator of the mischief was a cat who went by the nominal description of ‘fat-face-long-claws’. He had been, by all accounts, thoroughly bored - which, it should be noted, is deeply unhealthy for any feline species. (As an aside to this story, we would recommend that you keep a particularly close eye on your pets from now on.) As a result of this aforementioned ennui, fat-face-long-claws dared black-feet-sharp-teeth to hide short-tail’s beloved collection of porcelain mice. Black-feet-sharp-teeth, being in possession of the proper quantity of feline pride, was quite unable to decline the challenge, and less than two minutes later the newly-appropriated porcelain mice were being employed as chess pieces. This is generally the moment that the infamous Dare Game of the Cats is said to have begun.

To say that short-tail was unimpressed would not cover the extent to which his fury spiralled across the never-ending-dark – in fact, the ferocity of short-tail was later described by eyewitnesses as the embodiment of a nuclear-powered fur ball. In spite of this legendary ire, short-tail was a notorious coward. A previous incident with a dog and a lawnmower had not only left him the unfortunate designation of ‘short-tail’, but also a terrible fear of both confrontation and lawnmowers. Interestingly, the history books suggest that the dog was forgiven.

Being such a coward, short-tail didn’t seek his own retaliation. Instead, he dared tortoise-face-little-claws to eat the offending chess board – a challenge that delighted tortoise-face-little-claws, who was perpetually seeking out new types of food.

Fat-face-long-claws, who had been on the verge of winning his third successive game, was thoroughly affronted by this turn of events. With barely a hesitation, he dared tortoise-face-little-claws to swallow the porcelain mice.

Not long after this had occurred, short-tail took a pair of nail clippers to fat-face-long-claw’s right paw. Short-tail painted the clippings black and hung them from a string around his neck.

It was then that fat-face-long-claws stole a lawnmower from the nearest Realm of Real Things and chased short-tail to the very edge of the never-ending-dark. Short-tail may or may not have deserved this, but either way, it didn’t take him long to come up with an appropriate act of revenge - he dared tortoise-face-little-claws to eat the offending lawnmower. Tortoise-face-little-claws was only too delighted to oblige.

You may or may not be aware of this, but it is a well-documented fact that cats have an exceedingly short attention span. Following the unfortunate demise of the lawnmower, both fat-face-long-claws and short-tail were content to shake tails and proceed with their regular schedule of sofa-time and sleep. Nothing more was said between either of them with regard to the Dare Game.

Tortoise-face-little-claws, however, was not so fortunate – and it is to him that the cause of the Fifth Creation is attributed. It has been reported that lawnmowers are not designed for general feline consumption – although tortoise-face-little-claws had displayed a remarkable level of cluelessness in this respect. Some twenty-two minutes after the end of the Dare Game, he began to feel remarkably questionable. Another ten minutes passed, and tortoise-face-little-claws began to expand entirely uncontrollably. His mewling protests were both futile and increasingly difficult to understand.

The fifth time the world began, it was born amidst the explosion of an over-full cat. The two-legs who came later would refer to this moment as the Big Bang. Tortoise-face-little-claws, however, would not refer to it as anything at all, and seconds before his demise, he had the terrible thought that the lawnmower hadn’t even tasted particularly good.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

cemetaria — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:45:45 GMT

et tu, Brute?

The Fourth Myth of the Creation

The war between the Amarillians and the Polarites had been going on for one hundred and forty two galactic years before the Fourth Creation occurred. If you’re curious – and I have no doubt that you are, for curiosity is the bane of all creatures - the feud began as a direct result of some questionably traded hops. It has been maintained by the Amarillians that a young brewer purchased the offending shipment from a travelling Polarite after a few too many drinks at an intergalactic tavern. The young Amarillian made use of these nefariously acquired hops to brew several kegs worth of beer for his sister’s wedding to a prince of the Royal House. The Polarite beer was praised by all who tasted it, for it had a truly remarkable flavour. The following morning, however, all but two of the wedding guests were found dead in their opulent hotel bathrooms. The two survivors happened to have been the only sober guests, and so the culprit was, naturally, deemed to be the hops.

The Polarites have always refused to take responsibility for the incident, in spite of repeated Amarillian demands. Their government has continued to state that the hop supply was entirely above board, and they surmise that the poisoning must have occurred sometime during the brewing process.

Thus it was - a war began.

Exactly one hundred and forty two years after the incident with the hops, a Polarite soldier on leave met a girl in the Io Moon Bar. This is exactly as mundane as it sounds: they stumbled back to her room in the small hours of the morning, locked the door, and failed to properly undress.

The next morning the soldier confessed to his mates that he hadn’t known her name.

They praised him for this.

He didn’t confess that it had been his very first time.

That night, the soldier returned to the bar – he ordered her a white nebula.

His friends teased him for this, and, in any case, she wasn’t there.

He drank the white nebula alone. When this was not enough to blind his sorrow, he drank twelve more.

The following dawn, his friends clamoured at the door. They had heard a rumour – an Amarillian princess was taking her summer holiday on the moon of Io.

“Let’s get her!” They declared, but the soldier was too busy laying the remains of thirteen white nebulas at the altar of the porcelain gods to join them on their quest.

Some hours later, when the gods had been assuaged, the soldier activated the holoscreen from the comfort of his bed. He would not, under normal circumstances, watch the news (nothing but war and murders, he said) – it was mere happenstance that brought him nose-to-nose with the face of the girl from the bar.

Arrests had been made, the holoscreen told him, and he knew those faces, too.

The problem with thirteen white nebulas is that they rather cloud the brain.

It took the soldier a full minute to make the connection.

The fourth time the world began, it existed already - a silent sphere, too close to the sun - uninhabited until shortly after an Amarillian princess was murdered by five young Polarites on the streets of Io, whilst enjoying her summer holiday. The guilty young men, whilst denied a fair trial, were protected from execution by the Intergalactic Peace Council. They were sentenced instead to banishment – to die of their own volition on an unexplored rock.

On the day of The Exile, almost seven million people bundled into the streets of Io to watch the spectacle first hand, and the holoscreen network crashed seventeen times in the space of an hour. In spite of both the Amarillians and Polarites being banned from the event, several suspicious scuffles broke out in bars around the moon. The Exile itself was something of a disappointment – the banished five were thoroughly demure as they walked out of the prison. They took their places in the waiting spaceship (which stalled twice before take-off) and ignored the hollers of the spectators. The crowd, however, were here for the party, and they savoured every mediocre moment with hilarity.

Somewhere in the baying throng, a lone Polarite soldier took a sip of his beer and watched in silence as the spaceship vanished among the stars.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth

The List of Striking Entries - Week Eighteen

cemetaria — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:38:07 GMT

I have been very remiss in my lists of late, but here is one!

These aren't the only entries for which I voted, but they are the entries that struck me the most and lingered in my mind.

alycewilson's Entry
beldarzfixon's Entry
everywordiwrite's Entry
frecklestars's Entry
lrig_rorrim's Entry
malruniel11's Entry
n3m3sis42's Entry
lilycobalt's Entry
nyxocity's Entry
rumplebuttkins's Entry
whipchick's Entry
whirlgig's Entry
yachiru's Entry

Cemetaria

cemetaria — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:18:25 GMT

The Lament of Lost Voices

The Third Myth of the Creation

We are nothing.
We are no one.
We are not alive.

There is a common misconception throughout the universe, which states that the Void is a place of silence. It is a belief that creeps across cultures and tangles itself into the collective imagination of the innocent. You, too, have been touched by this thought at one time or another - it has tiptoed down your synapses and whispered its lies into your bones.

The space between the stars is the refuge of nothing, which harbours only an absence of noise.

The nothingness is empty, and it must, therefore, be silent.

This universal knot of fallacy occurs because no one is quite ready to admit that nothingness is, in itself, something. Neither is anyone ready to concede that the nothingness can shout. The darkness, however, is the loudest place you could ever imagine. It is the place where the Scorpion of nothing chases the Orion of everything across the amphitheatre of eternity. It is the battleground of Gods and the breeding ground of Monsters. Most importantly, however, the darkness of the Void is the place where all abandoned voices go to hide.

We are nothing.
We are no one.
We are not alive.

The third time the world began it was built by the Lost Voices, in their quest to feel alive. Pieced together in secret - stone by stone and sea by sea – the world was bound by the echo of a legend. It was constructed from the mystery of the Void, and upon completion, held captive by the peculiar confines of the dark.

There are many reasons why a voice may be relinquished to the Void. Sometimes it is severed by the suddenness of death. At other times it is left to rot in loneliness and disrepair. It has even been known for a voice to be rejected - purged in favour of a newer, more fashionable, model.

Once in the Void, the single lost voice becomes part of the amassment, clamouring through the dark as might a swarm in the open air. These are the Lost Voices of the Void: nothing, no one, not alive.

Unlike the majority of creation myths, there was no particular moment that marked the act of birth. The world was an idea without a source - a bittersweet declaration that scuttled without heed across the lament of Lost Voices.

We are nothing.
We are no one.
We are not alive.

We are nothing.
We are no one.

We bring life.

They sang the cacti into the sand, and fused with music the tumbling thunder of the waterfall. They gave legends to their human hosts, and buried skeletons of dragons beneath the mountains and the fields. The song tied the ivy to the trees and the lobsters to the sea. In the moment of creation, underneath an unknown rock, a newly-tuned cockroach nibbled at a flea.

The world was born in the noise and the ruckus and the nothing of the Void, and now, every time a human speaks, the Lost Voices raise their words in magnificent song:

We are alive.

This entry is inspired by the wonderful lilycobalt's Three Little Words entry.
I'd like to thank her for letting me build sandcastles in her sandbox.
<3

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth

cemetaria — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:02:37 GMT

Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

The Second Myth of the Creation

The second time the world began it was the unexpected side-effect of a rather flawed scientific endeavour. To be specific, the world was created during the final week of the summer, with the aid of a toy chemistry set. The particular honour of World Creator is ascribed by historians to a disinterested six-year-old girl - The Right Honourable Lady Viola Belphoebe Harlington-Haye.

Viola Belphoebe, child genius and creator of worlds, also happened to be the quintessential brat. She was the proud owner of six ladies-maids – one for every birthday she had celebrated – although you ought to be aware that only one of these maids had earned permission to speak in the presence of her ladyship. In addition, a total of three-hundred-and-four different tutors had attempted to educate the young aristocrat. Every single one of them had abandoned the post after less than a day, many suffering from the after-effects of a cruel but amusing prank. On one particularly notable occasion, Viola had hidden her cousin’s python in the tutor’s briefcase. The particular details of this story are somewhat distasteful, but suffice to say, the tutor was consigned to singing a little higher for the rest of his days.

The toy chemistry set that created the world had been bequeathed to Viola on her sixth birthday by an unknown uncle. He had heard that the young lady had a penchant for mixing mischief and surmised that this would be the perfect gift for such a child. In hindsight, the unknown uncle acknowledged that this may have been an error of judgement. In any case, the chemistry set had remained untouched on a shelf for almost six months before that Tuesday afternoon in early September, when the world was born. Viola, tired of her books and her porcelain dolls, demanded that the Speaking Maid bring out the chemistry set - Viola, you understand, had never known the name of the Speaking Maid, for she had never thought to ask.

Upon being presented with the requisite toy, Viola proceeded to toss every pre-provided chemical at the plastic beaker and then made a thoroughly heroic attempt to blow it up. The resulting explosion was little more than a disappointing fizzle, and the Speaking Maid took several paces backwards out of fear that Viola would subject the chemistry set to one of her infamous tantrums. After a moment of silence and terror, however, Viola Belphoebe ordered the Speaking Maid to creep out to the garage and pilfer as large a can of fission-acid as she could carry. Viola, meanwhile, pinched a bottle of fancy shampoo from her mother’s ensuite bathroom.

Some seven minutes after the first anticlimactic explosion, Viola had filled the plastic beaker with fission-acid and was holding an open bottle of shampoo above her head.

“Should you be doing that?” The Speaking Maid asked of Viola.

Viola told the maid, in a thoroughly unladylike fashion, to stop talking. Then, with a giggle, she emptied the entire bottle of shampoo into the beaker of fission-acid.

This time, the blast was delightfully enormous.

Subsequent investigations have confirmed two very important facts concerning the Second Creation of The World. The first is that the world was created specifically as a by-product of an adverse reaction that occurred between a plastic chemistry set, fission-acid and some overpriced anti-dandruff shampoo. The second is that, if the equipment had been of the proper academic standard, then the explosion would never have occurred.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth

cemetaria — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:16:40 GMT

Reinventing the Wheel

The First Myth of the Creation

The first time the world began, the Gods were at the fairground. The world began, in fact, because the Gods were there, and it is worth observing that if they had chosen to spend their day elsewhere then the shape of the earth might have been entirely different. Having said this, however, it is still quite a wonder that the world didn’t emerge, fully-formed, in the image of a carousel horse.

By early afternoon on the day of the first creation, the Goddess of Travel Sickness had managed to successfully afflict twelve of her companions - to the vehement ire of both Cleanliness and Mops. The young God of Phobias had, meanwhile, developed quite an aversion toward both fairgrounds and vomit. By the time Travel Sickness had taken her twelfth victim, Phobias was quailing in a Japanese rock garden, some twenty yards from the candy-floss stall.

The problem, however, with taking refuge in a rockery, is that it is rather difficult to conceal oneself behind a pebble. Phobias had been tucked away in the rockery for only a short time when the God of Peer Pressure decided that he wanted some candy floss. As Peer Pressure approached, the God of Phobias lay, silent and small amidst the rock and the moss – eyes scrunched shut, praying.

Interestingly, no academic has ever managed to write an acceptable thesis regarding the prayers of the Gods, but it is a commonly held belief within the universities that when Gods pray, they pray to mankind.

Peer Pressure, as it happened, sauntered right past the God of Phobias, who gave a little prayer of thanks. Unfortunately for Phobias however, the God of Peer Pressure decided, upon purchase of his candy-floss, that the Japanese rock garden would be the perfect location for a quiet five minutes of contemplation. Unable to see around his enormous stick of spun sugar, Peer Pressure trod, quite firmly, on Phobias’ left hand. Phobias, unsurprisingly, emitted a sharp squeak and, upon regaining the freedom of his fingers, skittered backwards into a bonsai tree.

“Sorry,” said Peer Pressure, through a mouthful of candy-floss. “Y’alright?”

The God of Phobias quivered in silence.

“You coming on the carousel?” Peer Pressure asked. Then, after a moment, he added a snidely malicious, “scaredy-cat.”

Phobias let loose another high-pitched squeal, for you see, dear reader, the problem was actually rather simple. In addition to a wicked fear of fairground rides, the young God of Phobias was utterly terrified of the word “no”. As a result, he had no choice but to accompany the God of Peer Pressure onto that great wheel of spinning lights and fear - the carousel.

The carousel in question, whilst credited in the history books as having played an active role in the first creation, was actually an innocent bystander in the matter. The world was, as it happened, created as a result of some rather ordinary rascality, and the carousel was neither here nor there. You see, whilst Peer Pressure and Phobias had been conversing in the rockery, the God of Mischief was at the Pick 'n' Mix stand, stuffing his pockets with illicit gobstoppers.

It was just bad luck for Phobias that, as he passed the carousel, Mischief decided to throw a gobstopper at him. Phobias’ subsequent yelp was so satisfying to Mischief that he threw another. After a moment or two – and an indulgent giggle at his own tomfoolery - he threw a handful. Pummelled by sweets and caught in a tangle of his own terror, the God of Phobias spewed forth a great wave of uncontrolled magic, which exploded into an abandoned gobstopper.

The first time the world began, it was born of a magically enlarged sweet. The ruins of the fairground were never discovered.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

The Second Library of Myths: The First Myth

cemetaria — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:40:12 GMT

The Traveller’s Tales

Three

I weren’t intending to tell a soul 'bout what happened on the moor, but it ain’t half tough to keep a secret when it gnarls you all up on the inside. Truth is, I was mostly scared they’d think me all mad and shut me away. I ain’t never going in a lock-up again, whatever people think.

See, people think all kinds of things ‘bout me. They reckon I’m a junkie or a drunk, and I’ve seen the women hold their bags a little tighter when I’m near. I ain’t no thief, but they don’t reckon that’s the case.

Bollocks to them.

I hope they get robbed by middle-class men in suits.

Like I was saying, I weren’t intending to tell a soul, but as it happens, I did.

It ain’t half tough to keep a thing to yourself sometimes.

I found him, down an alley, all stinking of vomit and piss. Asked him his name, but he weren’t in a good enough state to know, so I asked him where his mates were at, instead.

Glasgow, he said.

Well, that weren’t too helpful at all. I asked him where in Glasgow, but if I’m honest, he weren’t really sober enough for my askings.

He asked me where my mates were.

I told him, I hadn't been home in a while and that I was kind of stuck on the road, like.

He weren’t really with it enough to care. I lent him my coat for a while: ain’t never seen a guy so cold. He tried to call up his mates, but they weren’t answering. I ain’t going to repeat the language he used at the telephone – you can figure it weren’t too well mannered.

After a while had passed, he told me, in so many words, that he felt kind of like a putrefied turd.

I said I reckoned he’d feel better if I babbled him a story – take his mind off the turd-feeling.

So, just like that, I told him.

I began my telling with the day when I were yomping down in Yorkshire - yomping just ‘cause I were bored, and I like to yomp. What happened next, I told him, was dead strange - I swear to all the alley cats of England, a house started talking to me.

The Alleyway Man said he reckoned I must’ve been high. I said I weren’t and told him to stuff it.

I told him what the house told me – that when a person gets real sad or messed up, their voice gets all separated from their body. It’s like if you die of a broken heart, I reckon, only your heart gets left behind ‘cause it don’t want to go.

The house I met, when it was a man, fell in love with its cousin - but she died, all sudden, like, and he got left behind to yell at the plant-life and the ruins and the mud.

I said I reckon that’d be a shit way to spend the afterlife.

The Alleyway Man looked at me, kind of confused, like he didn’t know whether I was taking the piss. Then he threw up (no warning or nothing), and properly ruined my coat with the remains of his red wine supper.

I weren’t intending to tell a soul, I swear, but it don’t matter - he ain’t likely to remember what I said.

I nicked myself a new coat from a charity shop the next morning.

Life, as they say, yomps on.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

* * * *

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two | Three

cemetaria — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:35:31 GMT

The Traveller’s Tales

Two

There is a ruin that stands upon the moor. You have seen it, though you may not have sought it out. Taken by time, and the creeping heather, its physical form is all but lost. It has a voice, however, and that voice lives on – wailing and twisting across the purple heath. Oh, you humans - so entrapped you are by the shouting of your own kind that you do not stop to think - a house might also have a voice. They called it ‘wuthering’ in the old days – that constant howling of the houses and the ruins and the dead, their stories hurled to the wind in hope of being captured. The problem with humans however, is that they never stop to listen, and so these voices are tossed out into the world to be abjectly ignored. It all makes for a rather lonely life, if I am honest.

You’re listening, though, aren’t you?

You can hear me.

I have imagined this so often, and I wanted so much to be heard, yet I find that now I am here it is overwhelmingly peculiar. I must not allow myself an indulgence of emotion, however, for the ruins of this once-exquisite house have a story to tell.

Was that arrogance?

My apologies: it would seem that in decaying amidst the tangled heather I have forgotten the intricacies of human etiquette.

It is true, though:

I was exquisite, once.

My tale begins with a man from long ago, who set his feet upon my doorstep, in the days before I was me. I should explain to you now that the memory of the ruins is not the same as the memory of the humans – you will not remember that which occurred before you were born, but we remember everything that ever was, and ever could have been. As I said, it does rather make for a life of melancholy and loneliness.

The man-from-long-ago arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, with a suitcase and a hat. It took him almost four minutes to gather the courage to knock upon my door, in spite of his overwhelming exhaustion. He had travelled by train from London and walked seven miles from the station to the house. I knew already that he had come here, to the house of his aunt and cousin, because he was alone in the world. I heard them speak of him, before he came – his mother had left when he was only four and his father had died the previous week, sitting in the pub, drink in hand.

The man-from-long-ago knocked, in the end. He went inside, and was welcomed home. Time passed, and he got himself a job, and friends, and a Sunday-league football team. He played board games with his aunt and cousin on weekday evenings, and took the dog for walks. When his friends teased him for not drinking, he only raised an eyebrow and ordered another coca cola. When they made jokes about his lack of a girlfriend he told them where to stick it, went home, and played scrabble with his cousin.

He knew he shouldn’t have loved her, but this thought seemed thoroughly irrelevant in the face of such iridescent wonder. In any case, she kissed him first. They were walking the dog across the moor when she tripped and landed in heap upon the heather. He laughed at her, of course, but helped her to her feet – and then, quite unexpectedly, she kissed him. They kissed many times after that, and when his aunt was out, he played a record in the living room. There they danced and laughed and loved.

Have you ever danced like that?

The thing is, though - life is random. Nothing occurs for a reason, and nothing is fair. Six months after she kissed him first, she died. Just like that – tripped over her shoelace at the top of the stairs, and died.

In the hours that followed her death, the man-from-long-ago screeched and fought, and smashed a window, but it did not bring her back.

He ran delirious across the heath for miles, but she remained cold and silent under the ground.

He cursed all Gods and Men and Fate and Love, and then, in the unfathomable silence, he wept.

It is here that you need to learn - in a moment of desperation, an individual person may transcend the simplicity of human thought. The truth is, no house learned to speak of its own volition. The voice of a place is also the voice of the dead, seeking to regain a moment of lost happiness. Clawing at the memories of one perfect moment, the voice of the human will engulf the place and become the place.

There is a ruin that stands upon the moor. You have seen it, though you may not have sought it out. In that ruin, if you listen, there is a voice. It is the voice of the decaying world, but it was once a man, dreaming of a perfect moment, lost to the past.

How I howl across that moor.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

* * * *

The Traveller's Tales: One | Two

cemetaria — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:48:04 GMT

The Traveller’s Tales

One

I weren’t intending to leave.

I mean it - I really weren't. I came from one of them families where four generations lived within a hundred yards of one another and two miles down the road seemed like going to the moon. Until that summer I had fully intended to remain within the bounds of my parents’ house, stomping across B34 from home to work to pub until I met my death (whether that happen by accident, old age or glass bottle).

As it was, though, I hadn't any choice. I was gutted at the time - honest to God, I was.

Not for me, mind – I was gutted for her.

Natalie H.

Well fit, she was - dead smart, and all.

Three days before I was made to leave, I asked her out. My mates grew so tired of my bragging that night that they pushed me into the Lido, but I didn’t care - I had a date with Natalie Fucking H. I was going to take her bowling and buy her chips - fastest way to a girl’s heart, Ryan said. Jackson reckoned that Ryan really meant fastest way into her bed.

We never got that far. I wondered for a long time whether we would have done but it was moot wondering and I know now that moot wondering wastes the hours away.

If it weren’t for the stones I might’ve got into Natalie H’s pants.

If it weren’t for the stones, I would have never left B34.

I hated the stones for such a long time, but I also loved them. How’s that for contradiction? They took me away from my home, but they also handed me my freedom.

Thing is, I ain’t been all that honest so far. I told you that four generations of my family lived in B34, which was a truth. What I ain’t told you is that I weren’t really one of them anymore. It’s a long and shitty story, but I’ll tell you now, I weren’t too welcome there. I got kicked out, see. By the time the stones came I was crashing on Ryan’s sofa.
I weren’t too welcome there, either, to be fair. Wastrel, his mam called me - Burden.

Fuck ‘em.

I was out yomping when the first stones came. I weren’t nowhere in particular – just out, because yomping beat the sitting and the T.V. and being called a wastrel by Ryan’s mam. It was just bad luck that the first stones came down on my dad’s house.

Smashed all the windows, they did: forty seven fist-sized pebbles from right out of the sky. Old Mrs Sidebottom reckoned she saw them raining out of the clouds. That was bollocks, of course – they had to have come from somewhere, and the word of Senile Sidebottom weren’t going to cut it.

Problem was, though, the police thought it was me. My dad told them I were scum and Ryan’s mam told them I weren’t home that night.

You can see how they made their conclusions.

I don’t ever want to be in a lock-up again, I’ll tell you that. Ain’t no beer behind bars. Ain’t even a proper shitter, if you follow me. There was a crazy guy in a cell down the hall – all high on something funny and yelling his head off. I didn’t sleep.

All the next morning the police did their asking, and I said it weren’t me.

It really weren’t.

I swear it.

Well they told me bollocks, but they’d no proof so I got set free.

Natalie H rang me that night. Her mam worked in the police. She weren’t allowed to see me anymore.

I ain’t going to repeat what I said after that.

It was definite bad luck that the stones came back.

One hundred and six of them, this time.

It weren’t me, I swear.

Ryan’s mam told me to piss off out.

I pissed off out dead quick. Ain’t nothing that’d have me back with the police.

Fuck ‘em.

I was yomping through Glasgow, when I saw about the stones again. I’d nicked a newspaper out of a bin ‘cause I was bored and wanted some reading. They was in all the news by then, the stones. They hadn’t stopped coming after I left. Old Senile Sidebottom reckoned they was thrown by ghosts, but the police said that was bollocks. Yobs, they said it was, but they let the vicar do his exorcising anyway.

I ain’t bothered what it was.

I know it weren’t me.

This piece is based loosely upon The Ward End Ghost Mystery.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

The Graveyard: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

* * * *

The Traveller's Tales: One

cemetaria — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:03:34 GMT

Some Assembly Required

The Truth of the Deconstruction

This is the fifth and final scroll you will read in the Library of Myths

The final time the world ended, it didn’t end at all - you did. This is not actually a myth –it is a truth, but then, what are the myths of humankind if they are not true?

This is the tale of a young boy who wanted to see everything. He filled notebooks with doodles of spaceships and trains, scratched ghosts into the surface of his desk at school, and played at being Yuri Gagarin in a cardboard box on the roof of the garden shed. He spent his Saturdays at the library, gorging on atlases and encyclopaedias, or scribbling covert plans on the corners of maps until he was caught and removed from the premises. This boy’s name was Dill Golding.

In spite of these childhood ambitions, however, Dill Golding did not begin his journey towards the kingdom of everything until well into adulthood. Settle down, he was told, and be content with what you have, for exploration is the preserve of the ruffians and the mad. For all his thoughts of freedom, Dill obeyed these instructions. He took a job in a bank, got married, bought a house and went to the pub every Thursday for the quiz. Life crept on for Dill, and it happened that his quest did not begin until the eve of his fortieth birthday, when he caught his wife in bed with her boss. That very same night he packed a single rucksack and took to the road.

Over the next five years Dill Golding travelled over land and sea, from city to farmhouse, to waterfalls and forests to fields of snow. He stayed in houses and hostels, among ruins and thieves. He spent four months in a hammock in an unidentified jungle and another six with a travelling circus. One thing remained consistent in his travels, however - every time Dill moved on, he left a note; a ‘thank-you’ note, or a ‘fuck-you’ note, or a simple ‘I was here’ note. Every scribbled letter he left ended with the same six words:

I have not seen everything yet.

Dill Golding first came to the Graveyard on a Thursday afternoon. Like all visitors he stumbled upon it quite by accident, for the Graveyard has a peculiar way of being found only when it wants to be found. He had, in fact, been looking for a pub, for even the adventurous like to keep their dates with the barrel. It was in the Graveyard that Dill met the man-who-was-not-a-man, who called himself the Keeper of the Dead.

The Keeper of the Dead showed Dill the Graveyard, and told him stories – such stories as Dill had never heard before, of female highwaywomen and girls in trees and the flying men.

Dill told the Keeper of the Dead that he wanted to see everything.

The Keeper of the Dead laughed at Dill, and then took him to the place that hides in every corner of every graveyard - the Library of Myths. Here, Dill was presented with four scrolls, each telling of a time when the world met its end. Dill sat upon a dry stone wall, in the shadow of a yew, to read about boys and gods and cats and the repeated demise of the Earth. When he was done, the Keeper of the Dead handed him the fifth scroll. This was the strangest of them all, for it was the tale of a man who stumbled upon the very same Graveyard in which Dill now sat, whilst searching for his lost daughter in the woods. In the story, the man was taken by the Keeper of the Dead into the Library of Myths where he committed his own story to paper and in doing so became himself the Keeper.

When Dill finished reading he looked upon the strange man-who-was-not-a-man.

“Is this you?” He asked, holding up the fifth scroll. “Are you David Marling?”

“I was once,” replied the Keeper of the Dead. “But I am dead now.”

“I don’t want to die.” Dill was suddenly petulant. He dropped the scroll and let it float down into the mud beneath his feet. “I want to see everything.”

“All things die,” said the Keeper of the Dead. “Even I have reached an end.”

Dill confessed that he did not understand.

“Do you not?” asked the Keeper of the Dead. “Or are you just afraid of what comes next?”

Dill jumped off the wall and landed on the scroll in the mud. “Do I have a choice?” he asked. “Could I flee now and forget this as one might forget a bad dream?”

“Yes,” said the Keeper of the Dead, even as he handed Dill a scroll and a pen. “But that would be ungrateful.”

“Why?”

“You are being given a chance to live after death as more than dust and bones – to know that which the human race can never know. It is not ‘seeing everything’, for that would be impossible, but it is a great deal more than the nothingness that awaits the rest of the human race.”

Dill was taken, then, by an impulse deep in his heart, stronger even than the urge to leap from the branches of a high tree, or shout an inappropriate phrase in a place of quiet. Dill Golding was helpless against the compulsion of his heart, and he was terrified, but here, in the Library of Myths, he began to write:

“The final time the world ended, it didn’t end at all - you did. This is not actually a myth –it is a truth, but then, what are the myths of humankind if they are not true?
I have not seen everything yet, but for the sake of the voiceless dead, I shall try.”

You cease your reading here and look up, to gaze upon my face. There is a dark silence, and it feels as though you have stolen the very essence of the air. I wait for you to speak (your mouth opens, but closes, and then opens again).

You ask me whether I, the Keeper of the Dead, am also Dill Golding.

I was, once, I tell you, but I am dead now.

You are beginning to piece this story together. I have handed it to you in fragments. Hidden down here in the Library of Myths you begin to understand. I am the Keeper of the Dead and you are the traveller. You know what must come next.

I hand you a scroll and a pen.

It is time for you to write.

Go on.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

Part One: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth | The Fifth Myth

cemetaria — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:42:34 GMT

Curious

The Fourth Myth of the Deconstruction

This is the fourth scroll you will read in the Library of Myths

There was a rumour among the cats - a tale that had crept into all their stories and kittenhood games. The rumour told of a great glass city that had stood on the plains between the mountains and the river, built by the humans to capture the shining glory of the age. The legend told of how, in the aftermath of a feud within the monarchy, the Glass City came to fall – shattering as silver rain with a beauty so sinister it hurt to watch. No cat had ever seen the detritus of the Glass City, but the ruins lived, nonetheless, in their memories and in their art. Hindsight suggests that, in a peculiar manner, this was a prophecy.

You see, the fourth time the world ended it fell victim to the curiosity of a cat without a home. More accurately, in fact, the world fell victim to a cat who had been exiled from his home (which is a rare, but not impossible, occurrence). By the time the cat in question was tossed to the mercy of the humans and the wind, the rumours of the Glass Ruins were pandemic and the Great Conglomeration had existed for almost five centuries. Tucked deep inside the crevices of the world, not even the Conglomeration’s inhabitants could find it again, were they to wander outside the boundary walls. Consequentially, an exiled feline had no possible means of returning to the Conglomeration, even if he tried.

The cats of the Great Conglomeration did not name one another - not in a human fashion, at least. They never had a need for such frivolities. The cat whose story this tale shall follow was known to his companions simply as claws-and-tiger-face. He was exiled on the eve of the New Cat Year, for the most notorious of crimes – the theft of a brother’s fish. This story, however, is hardly concerned with the exile of a relatively insignificant mammal for it is the aftermath of said banishment that led to the ending of the world. If you are interested, however, claws-and-tiger-face protested his innocence until the day he brought the world to its untimely end (after which he was too deceased to argue).

On the day of the banishment, claws-and-tiger-face was led to the city walls and paraded before an audience of morbidly curious bystanders. His crimes were read out, for all to mock, and then he was pitched, by the scruff of his neck, over the wall, into The Unknown. Claws-and-tiger-face landed on his feet, of course, and within the Conglomeration he ceased to exist.

The Unknown turned out to be distinctly mundane. Claws-and-tiger-face travelled this way and that for a while, but in time grew weary of trees and mountains and big-hopping-mice-that-lived-underground. Following another unsuccessful quest to capture a big-hopping-mouse for dinner claws-and-tiger-face made an important decision - he would become the very first cat to explore the ruins of the Great Glass City. Thus it was that claws-and-tiger-face asked the swimming-in-rivers and the soaring-swooping-talons if they had seen the mysterious city. They laughed at him, saying it was a ridiculous quest, but they pointed him south, nonetheless.

With the journey south the world grew flatter and warmer, and the big-hopping-mice gave way to the most peculiar creatures, that claws-and-tiger-face could only describe as sticky-green-upside-downs. The sticky-green-upside-downs, told him (from the branch of a tree) to travel south. And so claws-and-tiger-face went on. It was shortly after this meeting with the sticky-green-upside-downs that claws-and-tiger-face met the Free Cat.

The Free Cat had never even heard of the Great Conglomeration, and when claws-and-tiger-face told the Free Cat of his quest to find the mythical Glass City, the Free Cat only laughed.

“Know you nothing of the humans?” the Free Cat asked.

Claws-and-tiger-face was compelled to confess that he did not.

“I will show you, then,” said the Free Cat, and he led claws-and-tiger-face south along the river.

Claws-and-tiger-face travelled with the Free Cat for four sun-up-sun-downs. On the fifth sun-up they glimpsed upon the horizon the very city that claws-and-tiger-face had been hunting. Claws-and-tiger-face could hear, so very far away, the reverberant echo of human footsteps on glass floors.

“That is no ruin,” he said to the Free Cat.

“That,” said the Free Cat, “is not one city.”

Claws-and-tiger-face looked again at the horizon, and saw that the Free Cat was indeed correct. There stood on the far away plains two cities, each constructed entirely out of glass, glimmering in the sun-up.

“The humans are compelled to fight,” the Free Cat continued. “They built one city, but they fought one another and in all the battles it fell. They built another city from the ruins, but again it shattered in the twisty chaos of war. After that they built two cities, to keep the humans apart.”

“Has it worked?” claws-and-tiger-face inquired.

“Perhaps,” replied the Free Cat, “for now.”

In the subsequent silence a soaring-swooping-talon snatched an unidentified rodent from the grass nearby.

“Can we go inside the city?” claws-and-tiger-face asked.

“If you like,” said the Free Cat. He led the way across the plains to the Not-Ruined Cities of Glass.

The Free Cat took claws-and-tiger-face to the nearer of the two cities. He explained that the cities were virtually identical, for they were both built in the image of the original, long vanished city. He also said that the humans in this city were much like the humans in that city, for humans were much the same all over. They entered the city through a gate, amidst a muddle of human legs. It was, thought claws-and-tiger-face, nothing like the Great Conglomeration, which seemed thoroughly drab by comparison.

The Great Glass City was a fantastic tangle of feet and humans and other Free Cats. There was hurrying and shouting, and frenetic exchanges of little gold circles for objects and food. Claws-and-tiger-face could hear the clear ringing of his own claws on the glass road as he followed the Free Cat between the humans, and the four-legged-trotting-beasts. Perhaps the most unusual sight of all for claws-and-tiger-face was the light. Not the light of the sun-up on the glass, but the countless little orbs inside every building that glowed of their own accord.

“What are those?” claws-and-tiger-face asked the Free Cat, when they came to a doorway. The Free Cat stopped and looked inside.

“They are lights,” said the Free Cat. “Does your Conglomeration not have lights?”

“Why would we need them?” asked claws-and-tiger-face. “All cats can see in the dark.”

“Humans need lights,” the Free Cat explained. “These are powered by nuclear-magic.”

“We do not have that where I am from.” Claws-and-tiger-face watched the nuclear-magic-lights.

“Then I will show you,” said the Free Cat, and he took claws-and-tiger-face underground.

The place of nuclear-magic was like nothing that claws-and-tiger-face could ever have conceptualised. The Free Cat explained that they made the light here and then sent it out to all the little orbs in the city. It seemed to claws-and-tiger-face that the humans in the place of nuclear-magic kept the best light for themselves, for these lights were the most wonderful of all. There were red-lights and flickering-green-yellow-lights. There were blue-big-lights and lights that changed colours if you pressed them with your paw. The best lights, however, were the ones that set off a loud wailing and made many-flashing-red-lights.

The Free Cat confessed that he had never played this game and expressed an overwhelming reluctance to join in.

Claws-and-tiger-face told the Free Cat that he was stuffy and trite, and then he found the best light of all.

The Best Light was big-and-red-and-bright-and-flashing.

Claws-and-tiger-face held back for a moment to admire its brilliance.

Big-and-red-and-bright-and-flashing.

He leapt.

The fourth time the world ended, it imploded at the paws of an exiled cat.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

Part One: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth | The Fourth Myth

Thoughts on writing [1]

cemetaria — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:14:17 GMT

copyright1983 asked me to post this here so that he could "add to memories" and find it again. Originally posted in the therealljidol Work Room on 13 January 2012.

I don't believe that you need to have had a particularly traumatic/eventful life to be a good writer. I know a lot of writers and the majority of them have lead perfectly ordinary lives in which people live and die in ordinary ways. "Write what you know" doesn't mean that you have to stay within the confines of what you see day-to-day in a mundane way. It's deeper than that. "Write what you know" is asking you to write about what it feels like to be a human being. It's ... hard to explain, but it runs so much deeper than the superficial.

The thing about writing is that on the outside you're "making it up" - and you are. Sort of. You can be anyone or anywhere. My last entry was comprised of a young boy and the Moon. I have never been a young boy and I certainly have never been the Moon. I don't "know" either of those things, but that cannot stop me from imagining those things. JK Rowling was never a teenage boy with magical powers. Tolkein never actually met a hobbit in the Shire or an elf in the forest. CS Lewis never actually went through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia.
Sure, some great stories come out of "Real Life" experiences, but even then they are not re-tellings of the author's life. They're still fictionalised for the benefit of dramatic effect.

You're writing about human experience and human emotion. We all feel grief and joy and pain and anger. Everybody feels these things, regardless of how tragic their lives -- so when you write you have to pull that out of yourself and you have to feel it on behalf of the character.

Writing "what you know" doesn't mean you have to write only about things that have happened to you. That's a preserve best left to the "Tragic Life Stories" section of the bookshop. "What you know" is being alive, about FEELING the characters. It's about falling in love, or travelling the world, or fighting a war with your characters.

All people have desires, all people have things they want, and things that annoy them. All people cry. All people laugh. Most people have seen death (even if it was a goldfish) and fear death. Most people have a belief system, or a lack of belief system that is, in itself, belief. People in the past were people, too - there is graffiti on the walls of the library of the Cathedral in the city where I live from the 17th century and the 300 year old schoolbooks of the Monks have doodles in the margins. The drama of writing is simple: A character wants something, and has to overcome insurmountable obstacles to achieve this want and in the end they will either fail or succeed and be forever changed. But a person is a person - that is all, and it is everything.

To be a good writer you need to absorb the subtleties of the world, to learn to see the details, and the little dramas and the big political statements and the little political statements and the arguments and the rudeness and the laughter. You need to notice the colour of the sky and the movements of people in the street. To be a good writer you need to feel the emotions of your character, and you need to believe them, even if you've never been to that place yourself. Yes you're making it up, but if you feel the moments as you write them then how does that possibly lack authenticity?

cemetaria — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:43:11 GMT

Sticks and Stones

The Third Myth of the Deconstruction

This is the third scroll you will read in the Library of Myths

The third time the world ended it was nothing more than an innocent bystander, caught in the crossfire of a relentless feud. This is not something that the guilty parties were wholly willing to admit in the aftermath, and the legal battles that followed would continue to occupy the Intergalactic Press for several months. The demise of the Earth was, you understand, perceived by the rest of the Universe as quite a travesty - the Earth was both entirely innocent in the matter and thoroughly unaware of the alien society that led to its destruction.

The end of the world did not come to pass as a result of war, but occurred instead by way of a somewhat trivial quarrel between two young brothers from the Royal House of the Andromeda Galaxy. The altercation ensued as a result of some egocentric tattling in the back of a spaceship on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Prince Amaria, the younger of the two brothers, had performed rather well in his Advanced Numeracy exam at school and saw fit to tease his brother, who had barely scraped a pass in the same test. Prince Fortuo rather detested being referred to as a dunce and retaliated by throwing a half-eaten ginger snap at his brother. They were both given stern smacks by their governess and the matter appeared to have been forgotten.

Several days after the ginger snap incident, however, Prince Fortuo came top of the class in an Ancient Arts and Literature test, much to Amaria’s chagrin. Amaria, you see, didn’t see the purpose in examining twenty-first century pickled sharks and disregarded all books as pointless babble. He told Fortuo as much and promptly received another smack from the governess. Fortuo decided not to argue the matter whilst they were being supervised, and instead sat in silence, wondering how he could exact his revenge without earning a smack. It was in this ostensibly insignificant exchange of insults (and the throwing of a half-eaten ginger snap) that the world-ending quarrel began.

Some three days after Fortuo first speculated on a potential act of revenge, he seized an opportunity. Amaria had gone to take a bath, leaving Fortuo alone in their shared bedroom. Fortuo, being a meticulous and well-prepared young man, had planned for this moment and hidden a jar of spiders in the cupboard. Amaria’s choice use of language when he found that his bed had been plagued with creepy-crawlies is best left to the imagination, but it would be fair to say that he was not impressed.

Four nights later Fortuo found that several of his books had been dumped in a bucket of water and left to die. That same evening he cut the sleeves off Amaria’s favourite coat. Three days after the incident with the books, Fortuo returned from his bath to find his entire wardrobe in a shredded tangle on the floor and was forced to wear a bed sheet for the rest of the evening. The quarrel continued: Fortuo dropped Amaria’s microscope off the roof and Amaria drowned the rest of Fortuo’s books.

Time went on and as the brothers grew older they sought increasingly inventive ways of punishing one another. They both continued to assert that the other had started the argument and neither was willing to concede. The end of the world occurred some years after the throwing of the ginger snap, when Amaria stole Fortuo’s brand new Fission Cruiser. The Cruiser in question was a gift for Fortuo’s nineteenth birthday, and when Amaria took it for a joy ride Fortuo was, understandably, livid. Without pausing to consider his actions, he pinched the keys to their parents’ Supercruiser and gave chase. The ensuing pursuit - which also involved thirty-four Police Ships and seven unmanned Kamikaze Cruisers - was aired on live T.V. across five galaxies and watched by fourteen billion people.

After almost nine hours of high-speed drama the chase came to an abrupt end. Amaria lost control of the Cruiser, crashed sideways into Fortuo and spiralled with spectacular elegance into the unsuspecting Earth. The resultant mushroom cloud was so exorbitant that the entire Milky Way was forced to evacuate, and the Earth was scattered across the galaxy in an innumerable number of pieces.

The following day, in the face of relentless press attention, Amaria and Fortuo’s parents, the King and Queen of Andromeda, denied all knowledge of a feud between the boys. The young brothers’ governess was indisposed and unavailable for comment.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

Part One: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth | The Third Myth

cemetaria — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:08:17 GMT

Counterintuitive

The Second Myth of the Deconstruction

This is the second scroll you will read in the Library of Myths

The second time the world ended, it fell off the edge of the universe. This is not, as one might expect, impossible. The world was, in fact, steered off the edge of the world by a certain twelve-year-old boy from Brixton.

The boy in question, Rye Malone, was a rather curious child. From the moment he learned to speak he began to question everything. When his parents told him, “No,” he wouldn’t cry or stamp his feet like other children, but instead looked up at his parents and asked them, “Why?” His parents soon learned that, “Because I say so,” was not an adequate answer for this inquisitive child. He wanted to know, in exquisite detail how the fire burned, how it was that late nights made you grouchy and how chocolate rotted one’s teeth.

In addition to this curiosity, Rye Malone was utterly fascinated by the concept of the universe. From the very first day he learned about the stars, somewhere around the age of five, he never stopped looking up. He was gifted a telescope for his tenth birthday and an atlas of the night sky for his eleventh. He even had the constellation Orion mapped out in glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of his bedroom.

On the night that the world came to an end, Rye Malone was sitting on the roof on his parents’ house. He had found a way to clamber out of the window, shimmy up the drainpipe, and assume a reasonably secure roost beside the chimney pot. It was here that he sat, nibbling a clandestine bar of chocolate, when he was almost knocked off his perch by the rather unexpected voice of the Moon. He did not fall, but he did, however, drop the chocolate.

Contrary to popular belief, the Moon is not made out of cheese, and it is not inhabited by a mysterious bodiless man. It is only the Moon, and as the Moon it has its own voice. If you haven’t heard it, it is only that you haven’t listened.

“That chocolate,” said the Moon, “will rot your teeth.”

This was the moment that Rye jumped and let go of the chocolate. He watched it bounce off the gutter and land somewhat inelegantly in a hydrangea bush. Then he gave a thoroughly indignant yelp and shouted up at the Moon, “I was eating that!”

There was silence and Rye suspected that if the Moon could have shrugged then it would have done. Several minutes passed before Rye finally asked the Moon, “What do you want?”

“I want to see the universe,” said the Moon.

“Can’t you see it from there?” asked Rye.

“Can you see Australia from Brixton?” the Moon retorted.

“That’s different.” Rye folded his arms. “How are you going to see the universe? You’re stuck to the Earth.”

“You,” said the Moon.

“Me?”

“Yes. You are going to sail the earth around the universe.”

Rye paused for a moment. He unfolded his arms, scratched his head and then folded them again. “Is the universe round?”

“Of course the universe is round,” the Moon replied.

“How do you know?” asked Rye.

The Moon was silent for a moment before it gave an answer, “I know it is round because the Sun is round and the Earth is round and I am round. Therefore the universe must also be round.”

“I’m not round,” Rye pointed out.

“Of course not, you’re a boy. You’re boy-shaped.”

Rye thought that if the Moon could smirk then it would be smirking at him then.

“You need to make a sail,” the Moon continued.

“A sail?”

“How do you expect us to see the universe if we do not have a sail? A bed sheet will do.”

“Why should I?” asked Rye. His arms remained folded across the front of his striped pyjama top. He had the sudden and overwhelming feeling that the Moon was staring him down; he squirmed.

“Why not?” replied the Moon.

“Fine.” Rye stuck his tongue out at the Moon. “Only if I can have some more chocolate.”

“It’ll rot your teeth.”

“So?”

“As you wish.”

Thus it was that Rye Malone, with a second bar of chocolate and a sail made out of a bed sheet, steered the world off the edge of universe - which was most definitely not round.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:

Part One: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth | The Second Myth

cemetaria — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:01:41 GMT

A Travelling Travesty

The First Myth of the Deconstruction

This is the first scroll you will read in the Library of Myths.

The first time the world ended, the Gods were at the circus. This is not a statement that draws attention to the frivolity of mere chance: the world ended, in fact, because the Gods were there. I say, “The Gods,” but what I actually mean is, all the Gods except one: The God of Protest spent the entire afternoon sitting in a makeshift animal cage some half a mile down the road and had nothing whatsoever to do with the ending of the world. As I understand it, he spent a number of subsequent months protesting about this. This, however, is beside the point.

The Gods at the circus had been remarkably well behaved for the duration of the show: Pandemonium had even refrained from persuading the lions to eat the tamer. It wasn’t until the trapeze artists began their final routine that the End Of The World became an impending possibility, for it was in this moment that the God of Fruitless Challenges leaned across to the God of Never-ending Toil and said, “Bet you can’t do that.”

Never-ending Toil said nothing, but instead threw a handful of popcorn at Fruitless Challenges. He missed and hit the God of Perpetual Anger - right on the nose, as it happened, which, in defence of Never-ending Toil, was not an inconspicuous target. This act of inaccurate and inconsiderate popcorn throwing is what marked the beginning of the End Of The World. Perpetual Anger showed remarkable restraint at being hit in the face by a cluster bomb of popped corn. He leaned across, knocking Fruitless Challenges’ prized pirate hat to the floor, and whispered to Never-ending Toil, “Bet you can’t do that.”

In the row behind them, Peer Pressure performed a remarkably accurate impression of a chicken, and the Goddess of Gossiping Girls whispered, “Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat,” over and over, until Impatience hit her in the face with an empty bottle of Coca Cola.

At this point Never-ending Toil got up, winked at the God of Competitiveness and said to Fruitless Challenges, “Bet I’m better than you.” He proceeded to gatecrash the circus act by swinging quite spectacularly on the outside of the flaming hoop. Competitiveness and Fruitless Challenges, not to be outdone, took to the trapezes in quick succession. During the minutes that followed several innocent members of the audience fainted and had to be carried outside for some air: there were now one hundred and twelve Gods and Goddesses performing the most peculiar and precarious trapeze acts ever to be seen in a Big Top.

However foolish the actions of these divine beings may seem, they did not directly cause the first occurrence of End Of The World. That dubious honour falls to the one deity who, whilst at the circus, wasn’t hanging upside-down from the roof of the Big Top. The Goddess of Accidental Magic was, at the time, rather small for her age, and easily embarrassed - it is to her that the honour of “World Ender” is attributed. Alone on the back row, amidst the abandoned seats of her colleagues, she made the decision to use her power of deus ex machina. The problem, however, with deus ex machina (aside from it being woefully under-examined by scientists) is that it is notoriously unpredictable. In trying to remove one hundred and twelve deities from the ceiling, Accidental Magic inadvertently gave to one of the circus lions the power of Perpetual Rapid Growth.

The first time the world ended, it was eaten by a perplexed and over-sized lion.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:
Part One: One | Two | Three | Four | Five

The Library of Myths: The First Myth

cemetaria — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:39:48 GMT

Five

Bupkis

Stop.

Even in silence the human race can be so unbearably loud.

Cease all your thinking, your reading, and your idle wondering about where you’re going next.

Amidst the cacophony of your human thoughts I challenge you, thus:

I say to you that you do not care about the people who lie in real silence under this earth. You listen to my tales because you have no other choice. You stay because I compel you to do so, and because in your own human way you are curious as to my true purpose. I have told you my name, but no more, and in my name I have already revealed my purpose.

I am the Keeper of the Dead and nothing more or less than that will do.

My saying this, however, will not abate that peculiar curiosity of yours. Instead, then, I will ask you only to suspend your silent analysis of my purpose and listen to my words.

You do not need to understand everything.

Here, in this unfamiliar place, I challenge you to accept an unimaginable truth.

Everything is connected to nothing, and nothing is everything. It is only chance that has drawn together the disparate fragments of nonentity that amass to spawn all things. The words with which you think and speak are made from nothing, and they will all return to nothing.
You are afraid of this truth, because you are human and so you are eternally compelled to mythologize that which you cannot comprehend.

You do not need to understand everything.

I have been telling you stories of such fragments and how they are caught in the scribbles of chance.

You do not need to understand everything, but you need to understand this.

Danny, Charlotte, Florence and Elspeth are nothing more than shards of happenstance, interlaced by the whim of fortuity.

You, too, are a shard, and that scares you more than you may ever comprehend.

I have one more fragment of a story to tell you, before we move on.

Danny Auster was quite middle-aged by the time he met Florence Farley. He came across her in a roadside inn, the name of which he has since forgotten - if he ever knew it at all. She was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, holding an empty tankard and wearing a man’s overcoat. He offered her a toffee, from a little paper bag, and then bought her a drink.

He asked her if she wasn’t too hot, wearing an overcoat beside the fire. She confessed that she was, but would not take the coat off. He asked her why, and she did not answer.

He asked if she was married, and she said that she was, but only after a fashion.

He did not pry, but bought her another drink and told her that she seemed melancholy. She was silent for a while. Eventually she told him that she had wanted something from someone and that they had refused to give it to her. He asked her what she had wanted, and again, she did not answer.

They drank, and for a while their quietness was absorbed by the general chatter of the inn. After a time, she leant forwards and told him a surprising thing.

She had stolen the coat.

When he asked why, she laughed, and told him that she had taken it for fun.

He must have looked perplexed for she opened her coat, just a fraction, to reveal a pistol, and told him she wanted his money.

He told her that she wouldn’t dare shoot a man in a public place.

She agreed with this.

He left her the bag of toffees, instead, and went on his way.

The following evening, on a barren stretch of road, Florence Farley was shot dead by a man she was trying to rob.

It is said that everything happens for a reason.

It is said, too, that nothing happens for a reason.

These thoughts are the same thought, seen from opposite windows of an urban gunfight, somewhere in the twenty-first century.

The words with which you think and speak are formed from nothing, and with the passing of the ages, they, like all things, will come to ruin and dust. It is a truth, also, that someday even the ghost of the dust will be reclaimed by the void from whence it came.

Your silence is perplexing. I struggle to read your reaction, for I am not human, and I do not comprehend.

Are you angry, or simply perplexed?

You do not need to understand everything, but in the breadth of time, you may come to understand me.

This is where I am taking you next: to the place that hides in every corner of every graveyard. It is a place that knows of nothingness, for it is where every human myth that ever was, and ever shall be, waits to be recalled by humankind.

Tell me, for you are the child of the mighty human race, and this is your journey, shall we go on?

End of Cemetaria: Part One.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:
Part One: One | Two | Three | Four

The List of Striking Entries - Week Six

cemetaria — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:37:46 GMT

Late this week, but here is is, nonetheless.
As ever, these aren't the only entries for which I voted, but they are the entries that struck me the most and lingered in my mind.

The List of Striking Entries - Week Six

alien_infinity's Entry
beldarzfixon's Entry
blythe025's Entry
diagenou's Entry
ecosopher's Entry
hypnagogie's Entry
iamthesea's Entry
milk_and_glass's Entry
n3m3sis42's Entry
redvelvetgrrl's Entry
roina_arwen's Entry
ryl's Entry
spydielives's Entry
shimmerdream's Entry
thaliontholwen's Entry
whipchick's Entry

Cemetaria

cemetaria — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:22:30 GMT

Four

Food Memory

Danny never knew his own last name. He knew hers, though, for it was her name that he stole for himself.

He met her on the day that she fell from the tree, when he wondered at his mind, which he presumed had constructed a strange hallucination. You see, Danny was something of a stray and a scrounger, although he had a profound inability to acquire anything of use. As a result, Danny was hungry, and in his hunger, he presumed that he was imagining things.

He wasn’t.

The strange young woman stood up, apologised for startling him and introduced herself. Danny, struck mute by the inevitable shock of a girl falling out of the sky, stared at her. She took small paper bag from the pocket of her skirt and offered him a toffee. He took three and forced them all into his mouth at once - they stuck his teeth together.

He wondered whether he should ask her why she had been up a tree, but before he managed to separate his teeth she told him anyway. She said that she wanted to fly and then invited him to join her in re-climbing the tree.

He thought perhaps he ought to tell her that she had already fallen once and so this was possibly not the greatest idea, but his teeth were still stuck together. At a loss for what else to do, he followed her into the tree, trying hard not to look up her petticoats as they climbed.

They sat opposite one another, as close to the top of the tree as they were able to climb - she on her branch and he on his. He thought he could see the whole forest from here - an endless sea of treetops, undulating their way to the horizon.

He asked her if this is what it would feel like to fly.

She asked him if he had ever kissed a girl. He must have blushed, for she giggled, leaned forwards and, quite unexpectedly, kissed him. She tasted of toffee, which he supposed was rather nice. He told her so, and she giggled again. She had, he thought, the giggle of a little girl.

He asked her how old she was.

She told him that he should not ask a woman her age, but that one was never too old or too young to fly.

That was, in fact, the last thing she ever said. A moment later the branch upon which she sat gave way. The sound it made was not terrible or loud, or anything like the overdramatic descriptions that one might read in a book - it simply broke, with an understated crack. She did not wail or shriek as she fell, and by the time Danny had even registered what was happening, the young woman was already dead.

He learned later that she was twenty-two years old.

Her family were poor, and so she was interred in an unmarked grave. For a time Danny visited her with stories of the things he had seen in the treetops, and other ways he had learned how to fly. Each time he left, he placed a toffee on the earth under which she lay and promised to return the following day. It is a fact both melancholy and delightful, however, that life does not stand still for long. You know this, for you too have looked out of your window in the time that follows the receiving of bad news and wondered why the world hasn’t stopped to grapple with your grief. Thus it was that there came to Danny a tomorrow when he did not visit, and he did not fly. His life, such as it was, went on.

Sometimes, in later years, when no one else was there, Danny would stand in the silence and speak her name out loud, for in the power of a whispered name a person, and a kiss, may live forever. Even you, having never met that young woman, may close your eyes and whisper her name into the sky, and when you do you may taste the vague ghost of toffee on your tongue.
Say it slowly, but do not be afraid. The dead, after all, are only dead.

Her name was Charlotte Auster.

Read the rest of Cemetaria:
One | Two | Three

The List of Striking Entries - Week Five

cemetaria — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:09:25 GMT

As always, these aren't the only entries for which I voted, but they are the entries that struck me the most and lingered in my mind.

The List of Striking Entries - Week Five

agirlnamedluna's Entry
autumn_writing's Entry
cacophonesque's Entry
dslartoo's Entry
ellakite's Entry
locknkey's Entry
mac_arthur_park's Entry
mstrobel's Entry
lilycobalt's Entry
nyxocity's Entry
rattsu's Entry
read2781's Entry
scorbolt's Entry
waveform_delta's Entry

Cemetaria

cemetaria — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:22:23 GMT

Three

Inconceivable

We face each other across the empty air. It is the air that is the breath of those who are now deceased and those who are yet to die. We face each other - you, the human, and I, the Keeper of the Dead.

You are still so very quiet and I wonder, as I have wondered before, if you are afraid. I think it is possible that you might be, although you do not know you are. You have come here, upon the whim of an impulse that you do not understand. I know nothing of your journey, but perhaps you will tell me a little, in time. If you are to know me then it seems only fair that I might come to know you.

I suspect that you look upon my face and think that I am quite impossible. Perhaps I am, and this is why you are afraid, for it is a universal truth that the human race is most afraid of that which it does not understand.

I have another question for you to ponder.

It is called by some the Unknowable Question.

Where do you go when you die?

You did not know it until now, but you are standing upon the unmarked grave of Charlotte Auster, who first asked that question when she was but nine years old. She asked it because, on the night of the first frost, her closest friend and confidante was found dead - frozen in the forest not half a mile from home. You have met this friend already - her name, for the few short years that she lived was Elspeth Marling. In the hours and the weeks that followed Elspeth’s death Charlotte did not weep. She took solace, instead, in asking that very same Unknowable Question to all those she encountered.

Where do you go when you die?

Her own death began with the coming of the circus. Charlotte Auster, then twenty-two years of age, had never seen such a spectacle as the circus before. Such excitement it garnered throughout the village: there were rumours of performing beasts so exotic that they were so entirely outside the imagination as to be quite unbelievable. For Charlotte, however, the dancing of the lions and the taming of the bears shrunk into vague insignificance when compared with the men who could fly.

Have you ever seen a human fly?

A man swings upon a single breath of air, a twisting, curling mass of human freedom. To watch a man fly is to see the freedom of humankind held captive in the sky.

Amidst the beautiful chaos of the flying men, Charlotte thought of Elspeth and wondered if she could see this now. She hoped so.

In the air, one man caught another by the hands and they flew together.

In the moments that followed that first display by the men who could fly, Charlotte Auster made a decision. Though she did not know it, it was a decision that would lead her directly into the grave.

In that moment, Charlotte took an oath upon Elspeth Marling’s grave. Someday soon she would join the circus, and she would fly with those impossible men.

She would begin by climbing a tree.

Where do you go when you die?

I cannot answer that, for I am not, strictly speaking, dead and the secrets of the dead are secrets only for the dead.

I know that you are eager to hear more about young Charlotte. Just as I know you still wait to hear a little more about the girl who became a highwayman. I must ask for patience: I will tell you these things, in time. This is a journey that may not be hurried, for the road you have chosen, once walked, cannot be retraced.

For now I will ask of you, only this:

Why are you here?

Where will you go when you die?

Read the rest of Cemetaria:
One | Two

The List of Striking Entries - Week Four

cemetaria — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:57:21 GMT

As before, these aren't the only entries for which I voted, but they are the entries that struck me the most and lingered in my mind.

The List of Striking Entries - Week Four

alephz's Entry
applespicy's Entry
banyangirl1832's Entry
daoming's Entry
done_talking's Entry
ecosopher's Entry
irishrosedkm's Entry
ladyerlynne's Entry
miintikwa's Entry
minnesattva's Entry
nyxocity's Entry
wrensgirl's Entry
zeitgeistic's Entry

Cemetaria

cemetaria — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:06:37 GMT

Two

Three Little Words

You and I are standing among the corpses of the human race, and so I must ask you a question of considerable importance:

Are you alive?

Do not answer me yet. Instead, I want you to examine that headstone over there, beyond the statue. You will see that time and rain have worn away the letters of its face, leaving behind nothing but the silent anonymity of death. You should approach it: lay your hand upon the stone and close your eyes. Breathe in. Take a moment to understand that, in the absence of a name, the bones upon which you kneel are only bones.

In a moment, I shall tell you that you are kneeling upon the grave of a woman by the name of Florence Farley, whose passing occurred on the fourteenth evening of October, in the year sixteen-ninety-nine. This was all the headstone had to say - it never carried an epitaph.

Flo Farley, you see, had been dead for many years before she died. She had married young at the bidding of her parents, and in social terms married rather well. Alas, however, her husband was something of a buffoon and a bore, and after the disappointment of her wedding night she spent the majority of her married life trying to avoid meeting him in bed. Night after night, when her husband had begun to snore, Flo would slip beneath the blanket and lie on her back, one soft hand upon her chest. She had yet to feel anything but the monotonous thump of a tedious life.

Over the years Flo had developed a rather unique way of marking the passage of time. Every year for her birthday, at Christmas and on the anniversary of their marriage, her husband bought her a pearl necklace. Every year she took each of those necklaces apart. At the beginning of every day she placed a single pearl into a glass jar, and when the jar was full, she took it down to the end of the garden and buried it in the shadow of the stable.

On the day that she stole the coat, Flo Farley had been married for a total of eight-thousand, eight-hundred and twenty-four pearls.

She would never be able to explain why, when she saw the coat in the inn, unguarded and alone, she put it on with impeccable calm, and walked away. She had, after all, only intended to stop for the briefest of refreshments on her way to buy a loaf of bread. It was in that unlikely moment that Florence Farley felt the first flicker of potential life, for what a peculiar feeling it is, to obey an impulse that you do not yourself understand. Flo returned home that afternoon in her new coat, and proceeded to dance around the bedroom in a newly liberated pair of her husband’s breeches.

Exactly five pearls after she had stolen a coat for no apparent reason Flo Farley was chasing that flicker of life at full-tilt on horseback, along the main road between London and Hertford. And thus it was that, in her new coat, and her husband’s breeches, with a pistol in her hand, Flo Farley hurtled towards the three words that would lead her to her final breath.

“Stand and deliver!”

After they had gone, and her purse was filled with the jewels of an innocent traveller, Flo Farley placed her hand upon her chest and felt the true pounding of life for the very first time. At that moment she had but twenty-one pearls to live.

And now, before I can tell you any more, I shall ask you again:

Are you sure you are alive?