Category: stories

…and the ground felt strange beneath my feet. Less solid, somehow, less there. There was the sound of thirty children being very, very quiet, and I found that disconcerting so I opened my eyes.

I wasn’t standing on anything.

That is, I’d walked off the edge of the box, as I’d intended to, but instead of landing on the crash mats, I was there, three feet in the air in my white gym socks, shorts, T-Shirt. My teacher fainted and I distinctly remember the sickening crack as her skull hit the floor.

She fell, we said. Nobody ever mentioned it again.

I can fly.

I’m not any kind of super hero, or at least not in the four-colour underpants-over-your-costume sense. I don’t have super strength, it’s just that anything I’m flying with is weightless, is flying with me. If it touches the ground, it’s heavy again, a fact that’s almost killed me several times.

How? I just… push in the right direction and I go there. I don’t know how high, really. You’ve read the story of Icarus? I think of it every day. One day if I go too high, will I pass out? What happens if I pass out when flying? do I fall? do I hover there, in the way of passing jet aircraft?

People know. My brother knows, as do my parents. They don’t understand, but they know.

And…

…and now you know too. I’ve been wanting to tell you since we met, and more so since the engagement, but I promised not to tell anyone else. I don’t know what I’d do if you left me and told everyone; but then, I don’t know what I’d do if you left me anyway.

Thats it, really. That’s why I wanted to come all the way out here, just to tell you that. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you before.

That’s it. Monologue over. Now.

Will you fly with me?

The morning was crisp and cold when I woke up this morning, I should remember to turn down the fridge as it means I have to leave it to thaw whilst I have the epiphany. Ephiphany was good this morning too, I wish Esel would tell me where the new supply comes from, I’m sure the delta will hit soon and I’ll have to find my own :-Z

Morning descoured and wrapped around my shoulders (Stole mornings may be out of fashion, but I’ve never been known to kick the echidna) I set off to catch the elephant downtown before the rush. Annoyingly, I was running later than I thought, and had to wade though thousands of them rustling around my transter just to get to the phonebox and from there get my ticket into town. I’ve never seen town so busy on a January before, even with the sails on it was clipping away at barely sixteen reefs. There wasn’t really any way we could bring in the reasons in time, so we just had to accept another diamond onto the plate. Twenty five this fate? I’m pretty sure we’re going to get resaled if this goes on much longer, and town will have to up ships and sale off somewhere slower, like March.

With the fire break came the yellow, and we hurried under the grand arifice of the depot bridge, watching the elephants shuffle back into their phoneboxes and the fiddly little umbrellas of the rainproof-violins before it cleared out and we could get back in to knotting the sales down and keeping the bats from flying loose off the town centres, all too late for one poor shop which, embattled with a massive understock simply couldn’t cope, and flew off the edge. Fortunately we managed to get it tethered before it did any real damage, but I think the time has come to go shrinking for a new wicker basket to call office.

This morning, a wormhole opened up in my tea cupboard.

When I say “This Morning”, I don’t actually mean “This Morning”,
obviously, it’s just that when I use the phrase “A wormhole willon haven
be opening up in my tea cupboard yestormorrow morning” people look at me
strangely, so I’m being forced to restrict my use of future pronouns
until such time as time resolves, or dissolves, or possibly revolves.

You see, I have recently moved into my new flat. It is a nice new flat,
with heating and lighting and also gravity, and it has fridges and
microwaves and shelving and books and jam and televisions and
alarm-clocks and beds and computers and cables and cds and beer and wine
and screws and allan keys and jumpers and candles and mannequins and
bags and coffee and hats and blankets and pillows and laptops and jam
(yes, more jam) and Christmas hats and headphones and boots and phones
and laundry bins. However, I have moved into this new one room flat from
a two bedroom terraced house, which also had a garage, and so have had
to resort to… unusual methods to place all the items that were once in
my house into my new flat. Partly, this was achieved by the use of Ikea
and gratuitous use of boxes, but this fell apart when faced with the
small issue of my tea collection.

I collect tea.

I also drink tea, by copious amounts, but I always seem to be buying
more tea at a rate faster than I can actually drink this tea. This is a
constant, so if I start buying less tea (as has happened since I moved
to Bedford, a place with – and say it quietly lest anyone hear you – no
real tea shops) I will find myself drinking less tea. Previously, this
was solved by devoting a shelf of a cupboard to tea, and then ruthlessly
throwing away tea I wasn’t drinking, but the new flat has little space
to devote to such frivolities, and so I was forced to get a portable
dimensional expander, which I sourced from eBay, knowing full well that
it was unlikely to be properly certified. the PDX arrived a couple of
days later (After being held by the post office, since they tried to
deliver it while I was at work). You may not have seen these devices, I
suppose, since they haven’t yet shipped officially from their native
Japan. basically, they take a limited space, and then by some means (and
here I’m somewhat at the mercy of my own poor translation of the
Japanese manual) reach into another theoretical dimension where the
container was built to a larger scale, and provide you with access to
that extra space. The further up you scale the space, the more unstable
it becomes. It’s revolutionising the cargo shipping industry, as you can
well imagine, although commercial use has yet to really catch on, as the
instability is difficult to insure against (If it fails, the entire
contents is probably lost in the one case, and replaced with something
entirely random in other cases, probably as a result of a “Switch” with
whatever the cupboard was being used for in this alternate dimension.
Theories, obviously, abound). Anyway, I installed it into a reasonably
useless shelf (The kitchen builder had apparently wanted a shelf four
inches high by twelve deep) and managed to stack my tea inside the now
archive-boxed sized opening. (Obviously, the front of the shelf was
still only four inches high, but it now was right before a large drop
that appeared to go right though the solid bottom shelf and end
halfway down the bread maker under the unit. A most weird sensation,
to be putting your hand though a shelf that patently isn’t there). And
so we went on for a couple of weeks.

This evening just after I’d got back from being home for the holidays, I
was packing away things when I discovered a box of boxes of tea that I’d
somehow missed last week, but as I was adding the last couple to the
extended shelf, something went wrong with the unit, and the shelf
collapsed. My arm, still trapped inside, stopped the unit from
collapsing cleanly, and a wormhole opened up in my kitchen cupboard.
After a great deal of effort I managed to pull my arm free of the hole,
only to discover that I’d gone back to some time mid last week. I
immediatly did what any self respecting geek would do after such a
traumatic experience: I went and talked about it on IRC for a while. It
was somewhat to my surprise that my doorbell rang a couple of hours
later with some representatives in black suits from… well, I don’t
suppose I’m actually allowed to say who they were from, but their
existence is interesting to say the least.

Anyway, after the kerfuffle of closing up the wormhole and documenting
it all, and Christmas and such it’s been a pretty hectic couple of weeks
around here, so I’m sorry to say that I didn’t realise that in this
revision of reality I hadn’t posted you all your christmas cards yet.
I’ll get round to it at some point soon, but sorry about that.

Yours Faithfully,

Aquarion.

(Ten percent of this story is ninty-five percent true, fourteen percent
is sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent is only five percent
true, and all the rest isn’t)

It came in the morning, in the post like everything else, along with the bills and the statements and a magazine about something I don’t understand that I apparently asked for at a convention I didn’t go to.

I missed it, to start with, as it was under the CD I had been waiting for for months, but there it was, in a handwritten golden envelope with my name and address clearly marked.

“You are invited to celebrate our wedding, on September 9th in Camelot.”

It was signed “Art and Jenny” as they aways did, and there were instructions to get to the coach, and I wondered how I was going to get back from then.

As he went sliding down the corridor – and who had waxed the corridor that morning? – I heard him say a word, and I knew it was the key to the final door, and behind that I would find the numbers. Now, though, I was watching him flail ineffectivly as the corridor tipped him towards the stairs. I turned before he fell though the crack, and wondered if the house would kill me too.

I pushed, and the wall slid back at my touch. The walls either side extended smoothly, unpapered and unpainted, revealing windows that looked out over gardens that weren’t in Cambridge. I pushed at the walls between those windows and again the room extended outwards, the crisp summers day outside those windows pulling away as my touch extended the rooms width another dozen feet. It was only seconds it had taken to turn this closet into a room bigger than my entire old flat, and I wondered old the magic that created this house could be, and how much of it I could learn. The room, though, was too big, and I was going to have to find Cath to see how you pulled it back in again. In the meantime, though, I went to get another door from the garage. I wanted to explore that garden.

The rest of the world thinks me insane, I suppose. I’m not totally sure I’d disagree. It’s a game I’ve played with myself ever since I was small, a game everyone plays at some point or another. It’s the one where you walk down the pavement without stepping on the cracks of the flagstones. Not because they’d be bad luck, nor because your getting scored for your accuracy, but just because it’s not what you’re doing right now.

I’m thinking too hard about it, really. 26 year old women in business suits aren’t supposed to play this game, and while the kids walking home from primary school can see what I’m doing, I can see from the corners of my eyes that their parents are going to some lengths to keep their distance. In my minds eye, I can see the path I’ve taken though the town. Every flagstone I’ve stepped on glowing white like a cheap week-day afternoon gameshow, and I see it as evidence of a path randomly travelled. Every chosen step a decision in my life that has taken me from the innocent crack-dodging five year old: Here the step that took me to doing maths at A-Level, over there the agonised decision that meant I dropped out of university, back by the lights – and just as important – the one that took me to the nightclub on that night four years ago where I met the man I fell in love with. Still love, I think.

The turn of the corner brings new flagstones. Smaller, and I have to adjust my stride to fit. I’m skipping a row at a time now, and the path is no longer a solid line but dotted. More decisions, moving in with my boyfriend, eventually renting a bigger flat, a year of domestic bliss, of me and him and us.

And now I’m at the shopping centre. Pedestrian precinct. The flagstones too big to step over, the decisions too big to make alone. and there it is, the made decision. I will tell him Yes. I will marry him. After all, six years is a long time to be together. We will be together forever.

And I’ll never think of James again.

“Mr Bond?”
“James Bond, yes.”
“Good. I believe you have been sent here to retake your driving test.”
“Yes. As a result of a mass-conspiracy against me by forces within the government, my licence to drive was revoked”
“Less of a mass-conspiracy, I’m told. I believe you were photographed doing one hundred and eighty miles per hour?”
“I was in pursuit of terrorists.”
“So your report read. Said terrorists were apparently disguised as… an Ice Cream van. In any event, you were photographed doing six times the speed limit. Past a school”
“A school for terrori”
“In a tank, Mr Bond.”
“Yes.”
“A reasonable person might ask how you found a tank that was capable of doing that kind of speed. They may even ask how you managed to do so without destroying most of the cars also on the road. They may even ask how you failed to capture the ice-cream van at the end of it. However, being both aware of your extreme aptitude towards Macgyveresque inventiveness and having read the damages list placed against you, I will refrain.”
“A reasonable person might ask how come you are a driving instructor, instead of a criminal mastermind?”
“One precludes the other? But yes, Mr Bond. I was hired for four reasons. First, I already know you exist, and therefore am not any more of a security risk to MI5. Second, the pay is slightly better. You should see the risk bonus I get just for sitting in a car with you. Third, the cat’s life I save may be that of my own.”
“And fourth?”
“Revenge, Mr Bond. Humiliation and revenge. Now move off, taking note of all applicable signs and instruction…”

“Now. What do you think you did wrong there?”
“I think I forgot to indicate in advance of the last junction”
“Correct. Also?”
“I didn’t check my mirrors?”
“True. I was thinking more of the way you took an uninstructed sharp left – where no sharp left was on either the map or the road, I should point out – and careered down the mountainside narrowly missing trees (Which did detach the wing-mirrors, making your lack of check slightly more understandable) before joining the road below with a handbrake turn and immediately performing an uninstructed emergency stop on recognising that scant feet in front of us was an unmoving lorry”.
“You would have preferred I didn’t do the emergency stop?”
“I would have preferred we did not leave the initial road. I expect you have a good explanation?”
“There was a terrorist behind me.”
“For the last time, Mr Bond. Nuns on bicycles are not terrorists!”
“She was carrying a gun!”
“That was a bread stick. Now put what is left of the car in to neutral, restart the engine and return us back to the starting point, taking note of all possible hazards – with the exception of nuns – and reacting accordingly.”
“You expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr Bond. I expect you to drive.”