Fiction Point Episode Eleven: The last mammoth

The sun was yellow, then it turned red, and grew very quickly into a very large ball. That was the beginning of how everything changed.

The herd took notice. Up on the hill, their proud leader looked across the open plain and navigated a route as far as his eyes could see. They would head further South. As they bent their knees and fought the wind, some wondered how much hunger they could stomach? Then cold got stuck in their frozen furs and fatigue drilled lines into their faces. They did their best to follow the trumpet call. On and on, day and night, through grey dawns and dusk, through great tall valleys and over hard high mountains; on and on, until they lost sight of where they were running, and the long march turned into a fragmenting line.

Those who could keep up, kept going, and those who were struggling, slowed down, and those who laid down, never got up again. First, it was the old and the infirm, the end of their tired lifecycle only slightly premature. But it was when the first young fell, that deep fears of how things were going to be, undermined their spirit. Eventually, only a few could keep going, until they too came to a stop, because they had got to the edge of the world. In front of them was a thick green sludge stretching up to the horizon, a swill of algae which could not be crossed and could not be drunk. There was no going forwards, and no going back. There was no food for miles and miles around, and what was left of the herd had no strength to forage.

So, it was not long before they too lay down in the strange comfort of the snow, the ice-wind blowing into their veins and shutting down their arteries. One by one they fell asleep, shut their eyes and felt it best to dream. One by one, they knew there was no point in holding on. They faded away in little huddles. Until, there was only one left: young, still fit, still standing, still wanting to believe. He moved away from all the dying, tracked east and then west, trying to find a way to keep living. He went inland and hoped to find something. He went back on himself, and hoped to find survivors, but even he, like the last mammoth, began to realise there was only extinction.

He stared one more time at the few remaining stars, pin-pricked in the dense cloud. Then he stripped off his fur, felt his skin freeze and the frost-bite takeover. He drifted into a dream, and took one last breath, before life came to an end.

END

Simon Marlowe 11^th November 2019

Fiction Point Episode Ten: The old man and the cold sea

The wind swept across the beach from east to west, cooling the skin, rippling the sand and watering our eyes. But even on the hottest day of the year, the North sea was cold, and kept the kids from playing too long in the water. My wife warned me about putting sun cream on my face, whilst pointing at an old man in the sea, who held a young girl in his arms, swinging her gently through the waves. ‘It might be his last wish,’ she said, ‘to go in the sea and hold his grand-daughter.’ Then I turned away to check on our own two kids, who were lying flat in a channel flowing down to the sea.

‘Oh look,’ my wife said, ‘he’s still got his trousers on.’

And the old man, with his wrinkled body, slowly waded out on to the beach. We watched him tread like a robot with iron feet, little by little, back up to the beach huts. He then disappeared behind a giant ice-cream cone. My wife wondered: would he shut his eyes for the last time, content he’d had his last moments with his favourite grandchild. ‘It’s like the cycle of birth and death,’ she said, ‘and he’s had his last wish.’

In the heat, laughing, splashing, screaming all around, we noticed a younger man, shouting at the sea: ‘Danielle… Danielle! Danielle… Danielle!’ This time my wife’s instincts changed.

‘I can tell,’ she said, ‘he’s lost his child.’

Although I was reticent, and said we should wait and see, my wife insisted we should help; she could tell by his face, he was desperate. And soon a crowd had gathered, offering to search the beach, search in the sea, call the police.

I kept my children by my side, wrapped them in their towels, and explained a little girl called Danielle was lost, and mummy was helping the policeman because we had seen an old man playing with a little girl in the sea. They wanted to know if they could go back into the water and cried when I said it was too late. I gave them a drink, a cookie each, and told them how much mummy and daddy loved them both.

I stayed in the car with our children who had fallen asleep. The beach was lit by powerful arc lights all the way down to the sea. A police tent went up, an ambulance came, and parents gave statements, including my wife.

And back in the car, ready to drive home, she whispered to me, so as not to wake the children.

‘They found a little girl who drowned,’ she said, ‘but no one says they saw an old man in the cold sea…’

END

Simon Marlowe 26th August 2019

Episode Nine: There are too many books

Nicholas Potts thirst for knowledge knew no bounds, devouring facts and theory, fiction and hypothesis with an insatiable appetite. He was on an upward trajectory, academically and professionally, when he unexpectedly announced to friends and colleagues: ‘there are too many books in the world, all shouting at once. We must have less, control more, so the best voices are heard.’ Unperturbed by people who considered N. Potts to have suffered a psychological breakdown, he set about implementing a plan to reduce and eliminate text and re-establish with one foundation source (i.e. Nicholas Potts): a distillation of all human knowledge, to drown out the noise and focus people’s attention.

The destruction of books, was an onerous task, but made simpler, so Potts thought, by the insider knowledge that the British Library kept a copy of all published works.

And fire, he determined, was the most effective tool for all formats. Unsurprisingly, Potts failed to even light a match in the Reading Room, or the vast vaults of voluminous archives.

He realised his project faced some practical barriers, which needed to be overcome. A recruitment campaign produced only one willing but able disciple, a naïve and impressionable young man, who appeared to both worship and love Potts in equal measure. Such was John Crestfall’s enthusiasm, Potts felt the need to act on his sexual impulses, which were mutually exchanged with Crestfall. However, less time was spent plotting and more time was spent indulging both men’s proclivities. In order to mitigate the impact, Potts decided the solace of love and friendship would enable him to work on the Year Zero text, required to launch the Less is More virtue, for future intellectual enquiry and publication.

As the years passed, technology and age overwhelmed them, and Potts last few years were spent fighting cancer, whilst retired in a quaint English cottage.

Fortunately for Crestfall, he was bequeathed the unfinished scared text, sealed in a box and to be opened after Potts funeral. So, Crestfall, left alone in the depositor’s room, anticipation coursing through his veins, unlocked the metal container and levered out a bulging box of A4 manuscript. This was it, he told himself, the inheritor of his master’s plan, the book to supplant all other books, the text to eradicate all previous text.

He lifted the lid and read the title: A concise encyclopaedia of all human knowledge. Crestfall, turned the page and smiled at the dedication to himself. But the next page was blank, no contents, and the page after that, and the page after that… in fact… every page was blank.

Crestfall, felt the walls close in on him, the despair and disorientation cut like a knife into the decades dedicated to a man who had proved to be a fraud. But it was at this moment, believing his own life an associated deceit, that his past years with the flawed genius, meant only one thing. And so, he took out his pen, went back to the first blank page and hoped one day his voice would be heard above all the others.

END

Simon Marlowe 11^th July 2019

Episode Eight The haunted dollhouse

‘Every little girl deserves a dollhouse,’ Ella’s dad had said, as he placed it down on a large chest by the window, causing his daughter to dance and clap with joy. But the well-intentioned present was to reduce the family to a strange accommodation.

It was Ella, who some weeks later, said her dollhouse was haunted. Houses maybe, said both her parents, but not a toy. And just to reassure Ella, her mother opened the dollhouse and checked inside. The interiors were modelled on Edwardian grandeur, but like an old house needing a bit of a makeover, it was worn and tired, frail and dusty. Ella pointed to the maid in the kitchen, a mummy and daddy in the drawing room, a butler walking up the stairs, and the daughter laying down in her bedroom. ‘But there are no ghosts,’ her mother said reassuringly. ‘Of course not,’ Ella replied, ‘they only come at night.’ 

After failing to convince Ella the supernatural was all make-believe, her dad decided to inspect the dollhouse while she was asleep. He could see Ella had put mummy and daddy in their bed, and the butler and maid at the kitchen table. He was satisfied his adult reasoning was correct, when suddenly, the gas lights flickered in all the miniature rooms. This was odd, because he knew there was no electric for any moving parts. Then he heard his daughter’s voice behind him: ‘I told you there were ghosts!’

Ella’s dad was ready to tell her to go back to sleep, when he heard a loud crack, followed by another, and another. ‘They slam the doors daddy, when they are angry, and they spit at you.’ As Ella said these last few words, he felt an acute stinging pain on the side of his face. But this was only the beginning. More stinging, more spit, came flying out of the dollhouse, burning through his clothes and into his flesh. He grabbed hold of the Edwardian snake-pit, more to protect Ella than himself, but recoiled, screaming out, as he felt both his eyes receive blinding wounds.

It was Ella’s mummy who dragged her husband to the bathroom, whilst Ella calmly closed the doors to the dollhouse. In the morning, after they had returned from A&E, with bandages over both her daddy’s eyes, Ella revealed what she had been told by the residents of the dollhouse.

‘They told me they were really sorry and just want to stay. You must promise to look after them and they won’t do anything wrong. But they said, if you try to sell them like the other family, they will never forgive you.’ And what would happen, Ella’s parents asked, if they did? ‘They wouldn’t say, but it won’t be very nice.’

After much discussion, and the willingness of Ella to play with the dollhouse, and the commitment by the parents to redecorate the interiors, it became part of the family, but cared for more out of fear than love for a potential treasured heirloom.