The Land of Tears

It was not raining… for once. We came out into a dry morning. The clouds hung low in the sky, heavy and foreboding. But the rain had stopped.

Maybe we would manage to get back to our beds this time without getting soaked. Everything was wet; everything that wasn’t wet was damp. That which was no longer wet or damp had rotted away.

I smiled – for a moment – as I remembered Jed saying something about the rain in this country. Then I remembered Jed was no longer with us, and then I remembered how he’d died and I stopped smiling.

The woman saw my smile disappear and she ducked down under my arm. She gathered some wood and kindling out of the box we used to keep the wood dry. She was still struggling into her clothes – such that they were – as she hurried to light the fire.

For a moment, I wished I knew her language so I could ask her name. I’d heard her crying in the night, last night, as she lay with her back to me, her naked skin damp against mine. I’d thought about asking why she cried, then remembered she could not tell me even if she knew what I asked. Then I remembered about the cold, the constant rain and how Jed died. I knew I’d probably die the same way too before too long.

Then I’d wondered why I hadn’t asked myself why I wasn’t crying too.

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[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

It was Nowhere

There was nothing there. At first it was just wasteland stretching as far as I could see. Stubby trees, brambles, weeds and grass, little more and all overgrown. There was something familiar about it though, even though I couldn’t place it. As I walked on, looking for anything that would tell me where I was, I realised it reminded me of the waste ground around where I’d grown up. Back then, there were many places where demolished houses and factories had been, with the site just left to grow wild. Great places if you were a kid back in those days when you were just let out in the morning to roam and explore.

This, though, looked bigger than those places, as though a whole area, the whole area, as far as I could see had gone wild. Then, looking around up on a small rise I had the feeling I was home.

There were none of the houses, shops, factories and all that. No roads, street lights and pavements. But looking around I realised that this was where I lived. There was something there, the place behind the buildings under the roads and pavements. It was where I lived, but everything human removed from it. 

Half-closing my eyes I could imagine all the human habitation given a place and a name. Eyes half-closed, I could see it all how it was only yesterday, back when everything was normal. Not like it was now, when I’d woken up and found myself here, either long before humans came to inhabit this place… or long after they’d all died and gone.

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No Stranger

We spent our last night together in that chamber above the main room of the inn. Downstairs we could hear all the others drinking, singing, carousing and having a good time. Up here, though, in a room lit only by a few small candles and the fire in the stone fireplace, we knew we only had these few hours together. Jenny knew that come the dawn I would be gone.

So we kissed and held each other. Neither of us wanted to say anything that would break the spell of our last hours. She held me close afterwards, lying on my chest, her hand wrapped around me and her leg thrown over mine, almost as though she was trying to hold me there. I could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against my chest as she tried to stay awake, even though both of us knew we needed the sleep; sleep that would not come for either of us.

But, eventually, in the end, we both must have fallen asleep at some point, because I did not see Jenny again for around 200 years.

I woke up again lost deep in some woods, not knowing where I was or when it was. Time had slipped by, that was all I knew. Eventually, using those tricks we all have to learn if we are to survive in this kind of life I managed to find some clothes I found I was back in the old country too, for once. But I still had no idea when it was. From the look of the clothes, I guessed sometime around the 17th century.

I walked out of the trees in the thick wood into a clearing. There was a merchant’s caravan there, stopped to camp for the night as the summer evening slowly turned into a warm summer night.

I walked up to the first camp fire. It had a pot of stew simmering over it and the smell of cooking meat and vegetables drifting towards me on the evening breeze.

‘Could you spare some food for a stranger,’ I asked the figure bent over the pot.

Jenny looked up at me and smiled. ‘You are no stranger,’ she said.

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A Cure for Politics?

Pilchard Defenestration is, of course, the UK's current most popular anti-politician. As we all know the rest of the population has grown increasingly disenchanted with both politics and the politicians who inflict it all on us. Consequently, there has been increasing interest in such election candidates as Defenestration. They are the candidates who oppose all the current political parties and their cynical electioneering. All of them hold out a promise to voters that they will – somehow – be different.

Although, as most people not infected with the political virusknow, anyone who takes even an anti-politics stance can become infected with politics. Especially if they get too close to anyone carrying the virus.

Although many people are immune to politics, it is always possible for them to catch a new strain. Particularity, if they have not – over the years – learnt to inoculate themselves against infection. Hence the sudden popularity of the Liberal Democrats during the 'I agree with Nick' TV debates a few years ago. Many people who had regarded themselves as immune to politics found themselves – often against their will and better judgement – feeling a need to vote Lib Dem after those broadcasts. Despite them having a contempt for the other two parties they thought would grant immunity to the political disease.

Of course the same happened when, recently, the UKIP and Liberal Democrat leaders attempted a debate. Many formerly immune to politics suddenly, in the days afterwards, found themselves considering voting UKIP.

Although, it must be said that, for most people, a dose of politics, although possibly worrying for friends and family of the infected person, soon passes. It goes, leaving nothing but a headful of meaningless statistics that prove nothing and a small scar on the memory.

It therefore remains to see if Pilchard Defenestration and his anti-politics stance are really all he claims. Is he a cure for politics or a carrier of another mutation of the political virus? The same virus that has infected many people who previously thought themselves immune to the banal inanities of politics and the political process.

Doctors specialising in the disease of politics say it is too early to tell if Pilchard Defenestration and his followers are really carriers of some new political virus. Or if they are – as they claim – the cure that mankind has been longing for ever since Aristotle was one of the first to warn the word about the disease he called politics.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Not About Her

This is not about that day. It isn’t about her either. It has nothing to do with that morning when I woke up next to her and thought about all the days we’d spent together and all the nights.

These days I hardly ever think of the way I crept out of the bed while she still slept and gathered my belongings together in the curtained gloom of an early morning. This has nothing to do with how the seasons were changing and the summer was beginning its long slow fall into autumn. I can remember the way I shivered as I gathered my belongings from around her room, not trying to look at her as she slept.

I knew I had to go and I knew if I turned to watch her sleeping that, within moments, I would be undressing to get back in bed beside her again.

All through that morning as the dawn became the day, I did not think of her and how good it would to be back in the bed beside her. I did not want to take her in my arms as she surfaced out of sleep and….

I left the house and did not look back. I know better than to look back. I know better than to think about her and those days we had together. I do not think about those times, not ever.

Most of all, though, I never think about Natalie, nor how stupid I was for leaving her behind... and I never think of her name.

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The Swordsman

‘So,’ she said.

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘Is that it?’

‘Er… it must be the weather. It has been a bit cold.’

‘What has that got to do with it?’

He looked down at his sword. ‘It is a well-known fact that metal shrinks in cold weather.’

‘Really?’

He didn’t like the way she was looking at him. He shifted his feet and put his sword away. ‘I’ll be getting a bigger one soon,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes?’ She leant back against the low stone wall behind her, half-sitting on it and raised her leg to push herself onto the top of the wall. She sat on the wall with one foot resting up on it, her hands over her knee and her chin resting on the backs of her hands. ‘Do you wish you had a bigger one?’

‘Well,’ he could feel the heat in his neck spreading upwards. She was not looking at the size of his scabbard. He stopped himself turning away from her, or clasping his hands over his groin. ‘I have no complaints.’

‘But you do want a bigger one… need a bigger one?’

‘I….’ He looked around for some way out of this.

She laughed. ‘You’re new to the city aren’t you?’

‘Y… yes…. Is it that obvious?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’ She smiled, warmly this time and shifted her position, signalling for him to sit on the wall beside her.

He sat.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Just some village… days away.’

‘Oh, what was it called?’

‘What?’

‘Your village… what is its name?’

‘I don’t know… it was just home… the village. None of us ever thought of giving it a name.’ He sighed. ‘It was the only place I knew. I was happy there.’

‘So why did you leave?’

‘The foreigners… the invaders…. They came one day… and… well… the village is no longer there.’

She looked at him. ‘Come on,’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘I have a home… not much of one, but I’ll take you there.’

‘Why?’

She looked at him, head cocked to one side. ‘Let’s just say every sword needs a scabbard, shall we?’

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In the Rain

Moments came and went. They fell out of the ordinary time, falling like rain from a passing cloud. Sometimes it was unwelcome rain, like a cold winter day when the hard wind blew the icy rain into her face. Clara could only put her head down and plough on into it, hoping it would soon pass and she would be back in the warm again.

Other times, those moments fell like the rain after a long dry, hot spell and there was nothing sweeter than standing out in that moment and letting it all wash over her.

Clara was there, in such a dry place, a long hot dry spell in her life. She felt each day as an endless trudge through a desert of possibility. Everywhere she looked, the same featureless expanse of emptiness surrounded her. Every step Clara took, left her no closer to anything she could recognise as some way out of her current predicament.

Her job was dull and poorly paid. Her friends were all growing away from her, falling into new lives that left Clara behind. All doing things she could not do, going to places she could not afford, meeting people she did not want to like. She hadn't had much luck with men and couldn’t see that changing.

She needed some rain to pour down on her desert life and bring it into bloom, fill up her dry cracked river beds with fresh flowing water again. But all she could see was the same nothingness ahead as she’d already trudged through.

Then, one morning, a morning much like any other, she was stumbling to work down a dull quiet street when her foot struck something hard. She looked down and saw a book, kicked open, with its pages fluttering in the slight breeze. Bending down she looked at the book.

Looking closer, she saw her own name on a few of the pages fluttering past. She looked around, seeing no-one and picked up the book.

As she glanced at the pages, flicking through them, she noticed slowly at first drops of rain falling on the pages.

She looked up to see a solitary cloud in the blue sky, the first rain for weeks.

Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Seasons of Forever

It takes the time we share and twists it into something new. There was a time when this was a summer lasting for as long as we could see. It was a summer stretching beyond our beach to where the sea reaches out to meet the sky. We never thought our summer could ever feel these colder winds of autumn. We never thought the trees up on the climbing headland would ever fade from green to these browns, reds and golds of our darkening narrower days.

Now we turn away from that sea that stretched away before us. We turn back from this beach, towards the forests and fields that lie between our fading summer and the winter that waits for us deep inland. The time of coldness is coming and we can feel it in the winds that blow around us.

You turn away in the night, chasing your dreams across a bed suddenly grown big. A space I cannot reach across to close, even if I wanted to, even if I knew how.

Outside, the nights grow ever longer. The wind blows and the rain falls like those tears you cry whenever you think I cannot see or know.

Our summer has been too long though. I know the sound of your tears and I know nothing remains here for either of us. Except the slow journey from this summer we thought would never end back inland to our endless winter.

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When the Empress Danced

It is said, still after all these years, by those who knew her, that she was the most beautiful woman they'd ever met. Even allowing for the way time alters perceptions so we only remember the golden times, it is still something remarkable.

Of course, history has a way of choosing who it wants to remember and who it wants to forget. History has decided to keep Empress Shilah as one of its own, while her husband is left for the dust of time to cover over.

This suits me.

Even back then, I merged into the background, becoming the forgotten Emperor, while Shilah became the symbol and the beloved of the empire.

Of course, that was not the whole story. As my wise old teacher, the philosopher Hedden, said to me once, 'while everyone is watching the dancer, no-one sees what goes on in the shadows.'

I liked to live, and – yes – rule, in those shadows, letting Shilah dance for everyone. She liked the attention, she liked the gold, the rich fabrics, the obsequious attendants, servants and slaves. She loved the fawning ambassadors and the politicians all eager to lick the dust from her feet, if her whim so commanded it.

They all thought that winning her favour would aid them in whatever way they thought would further their desires. Little did they know that while they plotted and schemed behind their smiles, while they manoeuvred and plotted to gain her favour or merely lusted after her, I was there in the shadows behind them listening and learning.

Of course, the stories and tales tell of all her lovers and her desires. But Shilah was not like that. Like all beautiful women who spurn men's – and women's – advances the stories grew more lewd and lurid the more of them she turned down and turned away from. She always, every night, came to my bed to listen to the stories I told her of what I'd learnt from the shadows while the court danced its attention on her.

She had no other lovers.

Except for that lover that crept out of the darkness of the East, out of the shadows where even I feared to tread. The lover that came from the plague- scarred lands and stole her from me with his fatal kiss.

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A British Sporting Great

Well, these days the name of Binomial Herbidacious is little known outside the sport of running about for a bit for no real reason. But back in her heyday Herbidacious was a leading contender for Olympic gold in the British team at the Carlisle Olympics of 1876. A remarkable achievement, especially since the Olympic games would not begin for another twenty years. But one of Herbidacious's great strengths was her starting speed out of the blocks.

In fact, it was reading of Binomial Herbidacious's talents that got a young Albert Einstein interested in both the speed of light and the effects of gravity. Mainly as Herbidacious was competing well before the invention of the dedicated sports bra and was a lady of generous frontage. In fact, several competitors in races against her, complained that Herbidacious already had an advantage of a few yards before the race even began. Many said she could win a close race even with most of herself still behind her opponents.

Her talent was first noticed at school, even though during those strict Victorian days it was not regarded as proper for young ladies to exert themselves physically. Especially as most of them needed a long lie down after divesting themselves of their very restrictive Victorian corsets.

In her infant and junior school years, Herbidacious was unbeaten at the egg and spoon race. She won it every year on her school's annual sports days. But disaster struck when she moved up into secondary school and her physical development made it impossible for her to keep her egg in her spoon without her generous proportions knocking the egg from the spoon. Nor could Herbidacious herself even see if her egg had fallen from her spoon without the aid of a mirror.

Her heartbreak was short-lived however as her sports mistress took a keen interest in Herbidacious and her physical development. In fact, in her autobiography Herbidacious credited her sports mistress and Herbidacious's attempts to evade her attentions, especially in the showers, as a major factor in Herbidacious's remarkable powers of acceleration from a standing start.

Lately, there have been calls to make this great sportswoman of an earlier age into a figure of national pride and importance. So that is why the current government, ever eager to boost their populist credentials, have decided that a statue to this leading figure in the UK's sporting development should be erected.

They promise to commission a statue as soon as they can afford to pay for the sizeable amounts of bronze needed to full realise Herbidacious and her spectacular assets at anything near life size. So naturally the government is looking to the public to make generous donations to the statue fund. The government has pledged to match out of funds it has already appropriated from the public, thus making us all pay twice – and probably well over the odds as usual with any government project.

So please give generously to support this monument to this country's great sporting heritage.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Nothing Left to Offer

I remember the first time.

We met down by the shore and walked along the beach together. She said she knew me, knew my work. Back then I was still a writer, still entranced by the dance of words and how I could get them to shift and turn upon the page to make a doorway open into some new way of seeing this world turn.

She took my hand as we walked, as though I connected her to something she could not otherwise reach.

I told her I had nothing left to offer, but she said, reaching up to kiss me on the lips, that none of that mattered.

Later, as the wind and the rain returned, blowing the waves into a storm, she came back with me to the cottage behind the dunes.

I sat in my chair in front of the fireplace, looking at the ashes of the fire that had burned there the night before, seeing in the cold remains some sort of metaphor I would once have grown into a story.

I looked up to see her stepping out of the last of her clothes. Pale green knickers easing down her thighs while she balanced on one leg, resting her one hand on the mantelpiece.

She turned to me when she was naked and took a couple of steps forward until she was standing between my open thighs. She leant down and kissed me again.

Then she sat down on the floor between my legs, curling herself up like a cat in front of a warm fire. Then, resting her head on my crotch, so her long red hair spread like flames across my thighs, she closed her eyes and sighed.

I rested my hand on her head, feeling the flow of her hair beneath my palm.

‘It is all right,’ she said, her eyes still closed.

And then I knew she was right, so I closed my eyes too.

 

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The Time to Go

Perhaps this should be the day I turn and walk away. Perhaps I should be gone from here, go back again.

I know I never belonged here. This city was always a strange place to me. I get uneasy this close to people, especially strangers. I am too used to being alone now.

I don’t know why I came to this place. I was looking for something, but what it is I do not know. Now, as far as I can see, no-one else here in these teeming streets has any idea of what I look for here either.

I was out on the road one night, sitting by my campfire, watching the flames when a stranger, some traveller came up. When I was sure – as sure as I could be - he was not going to kill me, and he was as sure as he could be I would do likewise to him; I offered him a place in front of my fire. We - warily, at first – exchanged food and stories of how we’d got to be in the same place on that road that night.

I said I was looking for something I could not name and could not place.

He told me that cities have so many answers to so many questions. What cannot be taught at the universities and schools can be bought in the markets or alleyways and what cannot be taught or bought can be learnt on the streets and in the houses that line the streets, looking down through open windows as life passes by beneath them.

I have been here in the city for almost a year now. I found no answers in the university, the temple or the market place. I found no-one who could tell me what I seek in the temples, the inns or the brothels and I am still alone and searching, watching the streets below for any sign of what it is I need.

Now, though, all I know, all I have learnt, is that the time has come for me to go.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Cheese of the Baskervilles

It began – as these things so often do – with the cheese. However, at the time the West Midlands Serious Cheese Crime Squad was busy with an undercover investigation into an illegal chive smuggling ring down in Gloucester. They believed this criminal gang were responsible for a Double Gloucester protection racket that controlled all the chives and onions in the region.

However, there were rumours that the revolutionary Red Leicester workers collective had been infiltrated by Wensleydale anarchists from over the border intent on creating anarchy.

However, there was a large amount of corruption in the Serious Cheese squad. There were rumours of some offices amassing double their own weight in illicit Brie. So no-one ever thought the case of the missing crackers would ever be solved, at least not in our lifetime.

Eventually, just to see if we could get justice, if not for us, then for all the other victims of the great cracker heist, we would have to hire a private investigator. Never once did we think that the legendary Stilton Holmes himself, along with his faithful companion Doctor Water-Biscuit would involve themselves in this investigation. It turned into a complex case, resulting in that fateful – and fatal - encounter between Stilton Holmes and Doctor Mycella on the sheer edge of the Reichenbach Tesco delicatessen counter. This resulted in them both falling to their deaths - locked in each other’s arms - into a huge vat of cottage cheese. Neither ever emerged again.

Thus, the case was never solved. As Doctor Water-Biscuit mourned the loss of his great companion, it was he who remarked upon the curious incident of the Gouda in the night time.

But that is a case for another time.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Headline Acts

Potemkin Fuzzpedal was once the UK's most famous nightclub and workingmen's club act during the heyday of those institutions. At least, before TV and social changes brought about the decline of those establishments. Until then, Potemkin Fuzzpedal and his Performing Accountants; a song, a dance and an internal audit were the biggest draw on that particular circuit.

For the audiences, it was the sheer thrill of live accountancy performed on stage – usually without the aid of a safety net - that was so exciting. Especially so in the workingmen's clubs. Places where accountancy was regarded as something beyond the pale and even a mere invoice was regarded with suspicion and dread.

Back in those days most people, the working class especially, lived in an almost total cash economy. Therefore, the use of accountants was virtually unknown. So to see a real one, especially performing on stage, possibly – and daringly – with one of the new electronic calculators, was a dazzling and riveting spectacle. It conveyed the full glamour of accountancy to a mass audience for the first time.

In fact, most of today's top-flight glamorous celebrity accountants say they were inspired to tread the accounting boards through an early teenage exposure to Fuzzpedal and his dancing auditors. Some even talking of their own first fumbling attempts at cash-book reconciliation under the bedcovers late at night. Often before falling into a restless sleep filled with dreams of VAT returns and tax schedules.

All in all then, today's glamorous world of performance accountancy, where some of the big name partnerships regularly sell out the world's biggest arenas has a great deal to thank Potemkin Fuzzpedal for. Otherwise – who knows – accountancy could still be – unbelievable as it sounds now – a mere profession practised in cramped offices by unglamorous people who know little of the fame, fortune and celebrity status now enjoyed by today's headlining accountancy stage acts.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Not Today

This is what comes from the moment; this is what turns back from the open sky and away from the sea of possibilities that laps against the shore of the now. We have walked these beaches so often before. Each time, your eyes turn towards the distant horizon where the sky meets the sea. You long to be back there, riding the waves and diving deeper than I have ever known into a world I cannot touch. Meanwhile, I trap you here on the dry land, hoping the memories of your water-born freedom will fade, until you know longer know how to dive deep into the seas that lie forever beyond my reach.

I have woken alone in the night to see you silhouetted against the moonlit window, watching the waves flickering in the moonlight. Longing for your home, until I call your land name and you return to our bed with one last lingering glance over your shoulder to what was once the only life you knew.

Then, each morning, I turn first to make sure you remain here on my dry land. I know one morning I will wake to find you gone. I will never know if you could ever return to such a dry life once you have dived deep again and swum out across that moonlight sea into a far freedom beyond the reach of land. Lost far beyond any horizon I could ever see from where I stand.

I know now that one morning I must take you down to the beach, to the edge of your sea and then let you go. I just hope, each morning, as I turn to you in our bed, that today is not that day.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Day We Met

I saw her as she came through the door into the café. I was sitting at my usual table, back near the far wall. There, I could sit with my back against the wall and watch everyone who came in, yet be far enough away from the counter so that I wasn’t bothered by people passing by me on their way to get served. I watched her for a few moments; liking what I saw, liking the way she moved. She had that special grace about her that fascinates me. I always like watching a woman who moves through the world with a lightness of step, a delicacy, but at the same time an ease and a confidence.

I could have watched her for a while. I had the feeling she would be someone who made a ceremony out of her coffee break. Someone who would sit, sip and appreciate, take delicate bites from her sandwich or cake, take an interest in the world around her. Me, though, I was too busy. I had something to write. For once I had something I felt I ought to write, not the usual half-baked musings on the inconsequential I’d been passing - wasting – my time on lately. That morning I’d woken up with a thought nagging my mind and now it had grown, matured, and was now something I felt I could use.

A shadow passed across my table and stopped.

I looked up.

She stood there, coffee and a cake, one in each hand. ‘May I?’ she said.

‘Yes, sure. Of course.’ I made a show of moving my laptop so she could put down her cup and plate. She sidled across the seat, knees together.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ she said, looking at me with an intensity that made me lower the lid on my laptop.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m more or less done… for the moment.’ I resigned myself to never finishing that idea, of it fading away and disappearing like a rain puddle on a hot day.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.

I looked at her. ‘No.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then we must not have met yet… and I’m just in time.’

‘In time for what?’ I laughed.

‘To save your life,’ she said.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

These Stories We Tell Each Other

We tell one other stories of these times and places. We have no choice.

Without the story of the morning about how the sun rises beyond those far hills, our days could not begin.

Without the stories of the animals moving across these landscapes and the tales of how the plants grow we would have nothing to eat. Then our dry bones would be the only story we could tell to that warming sun. Without the long twisting tale of the river we would have no fish, nothing to drink and no way of taking ourselves down to where the sea waits. Its waves tumbling over one another in their haste to hear us tell the great legends of the sea and the tales of the seafarers who risked all to travel across it is search of more tales to tell. The tales of distant lands and peoples who each have their own stories of how this world came to be, and their place inside it the sailors tell us on their return.

Without you, I would have no tale to tell of how it feels to wake and not be alone with only the trees and the animals to sing my stories to. Without your stories of children that grow inside you, then break free to run across these hillsides making the stories of their own life then there would be no-one to tell all these stories to.

And what else is there, except these stories we tell one another?

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

To Touch These Clouds

 

To Touch These Clouds

Down on the ground the grass will grow
while birds reach out to touch the clouds.
We could have once expected such
small portents shaping all our dreaming

as we so often ask for some
acceptance of so much we want.
Even though there are shadows here
amongst us as we make our way

between these rocks that fill these paths
towards the summits of our hills.
Up where we hope to emulate
the birds and reach out, touch these clouds

which darkened all our promised skies
and turned us from our green-soft valleys.
To climb these hillsides in the hope
of finding something here to point

towards. A promise offered here
of something better than we know.
Before we turn back from the sky
returning to our valley lives
to live in clouded shadows again.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Each Word is Less Than a Moment

All these words that fall across the page like snowflakes settling, like rain falling, like the tears that stain the page when there are no words left and still far too much to say. The words themselves shy away from the page, away from permanence, wanting only to be fleeting moments, there, then lost on the breezes that blow all the possibilities from now away into the unreachable past.

Each word is less than a moment, waiting, heaping up beyond the reach of the hand that could take those waiting words and pin them to the moment. Then spreading them out on this page to say all that needs to be said, before the moment is lost, before the time is gone, before there is nothing left to say.

She sits at the table, pen in hand, watching the tears fall onto the blank page. Next to her unmoving hand are the crumpled balls of discarded pages that didn’t get close to anything she wanted to say. A heap of words that danced around across her mind and over the page, none of them getting close to what she wanted to say, like dancers dancing apart and alone, her thoughts and the words never joined hands, never danced together across the page, creating something new out of all she wanted to say.

Now, there is only silence; a silence and the blank page that waits for her words. Now she knows the page will stay blank because there are far too many words and she had far too much to say for a piece of paper to hold.

So she stands, walks out leaves the empty desk and the blank page and the pen behind as she closes the door on them and dries her tears before walking away.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Where the Shadows Belong

It comes slow and careful through the darkness. It feels at home in the dark, light reveals too much. The shadows and dark places are a home. It can feel the prey as it moves oblivious through the darkness.

There was a time long ago, many prey lifetimes ago, when it would haunt the dark woods, waiting for the prey to come into the deep night of the forest. It would wait high in trees, or low in the undergrowth, for the prey to blunder into its reach. Then it would stretch, grab and devour, leaving only a memory for the prey’s kin to mourn.

Then, though, it moved, made its home in the prey’s cavernous cities. There were more shadows, more dark places and much more prey. The creature could sit up high on the roofs and watch. It could wait for the choicest prey to pass by. The creature could hide in the deep, almost solid, darkness in the cellars and basements for the prey to come by, sometimes oblivious, sometimes wary. But, all too often, wary of other dangers than the creature waiting to rip their lives away.

The creature knew this world belonged to it, and not to the prey, and it liked it that way.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]