“I must be brief. By which I mean, to the point, or as some say, succinct. There is no sugarcoating this issue. No, how does one term it, beating around the bush. Being concise is of the utmost importance. Of this, there can be no dispute. I shall tell it as it is, plain and simple. To embellish would be to waste time, and time is a commodity one must cherish. I shall shock and disturb with my unerring bluntness. I shall hit the nail straight upon its head. My mind is focused. My intent is as unwavering as a sharpened, cutting edge, dagger-like. The words I have chosen are plucked from a pantheon of such for this one specific purpose. Oh yes, my young friend, you shall see how direct I shall become. You will see.”
“See what?”
“The details I must impart, of course. For they are of a delicate nature, thus this exacting conversation. To see it is to believe it, but to be told it, well… it must be indisputable. You see, my attentive, well-meaning fellow, he’s gone to meet his maker.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s defunct, lost, gone, departed, irrefutably non-existent.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do! How so?”
“Shall I be brief?”
“Please, I should appreciate your not withholding those same indelicacies that I have not withheld from you. I would want it no other way. There is no other way. So, yes, you must be brief. In fact, I demand it.”
“I shot him.”
“Oh.”
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
Her eyes were the colour of the open sea, transitioning from calm to storm, rippling in sargasso blue, almost indigo, deep and dark, yet tepid. This changed as she changed. Her demeanour ignited. The calm still of the soul she hid so well rippled into being. Those waters that were her eyes pulsed a cerulean mirage. She brooded. I gulped.
Seconds became minutes became more, or so it seemed, and the storm she’d often threatened whirled a maelstrom of frothing cobalt. Hurricane winds tore at her kelp fields for lashes. All the energies of all the seas manifested as a single violent ocean. She churned. I feared.
The abyssal depths had nothing on her, as she exploded in ultramarine, a devastating tsunami. The tears poured forth not from sorrow, but absolute rage. Her world was my world, one of liquid purification. She laughed as I wept, as I fell, as I dreamed a torrent of lies.
I awoke to a strange sensation of bobbing, and her calm again cyan orbs.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“I know,” she breezed and leant in closer.
She pressed. I dipped beneath the waves. The blue faded to something darker.
The drowning didn’t kill me, just the reality of my foolishness: Her eyes had never been blue, but as black as her cold, dead heart.
The End
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
The shiver began at his navel and radiated out like a pebble tossed in a pond. Uneasy sensations swept through the boy’s torso, down his limbs to tingle his fingertips, rattle his teeth, curl his toes. Just when he thought there was nowhere else to go, the shiver shook the earth at his feet, shattering a rock as though crystal and dislodging several worms.
“Am I dead?” he asked no one in particular.
“No.” The voice came as even more of a shock than his shivering, which for now had departed.
“Then what?” he asked, undeterred.
“You are changing. You are… how does one put it politely, on the move.”
The boy hung his head as though ashamed, seeing his shiver had cracked open the ground, into which he descended. This was not a plummet by any means, rather, a falling leaf caught by a breeze.
He watched as the light of the sun he’d grown so used to shrank back into a pinprick star. This, too, soon vanished, leaving him all alone in a smothering darkness. Every sensation of movement had gone.
The boy imagined himself to have fallen asleep because he woke to a fog and his shivering having returned tenfold. His arms shook like a hummingbird’s wings. His head vibrated like a shaken cocktail mixer. A grey gloom pulsed around him as if to help, like the sponge packing around a box containing a priceless vase.
“All out of questions?” came the voice again. Definitely female, and smooth as velvet, it coerced the boy with uncomplicated kindnesses.
“No.”
“Not a one? You are an unusual young man! Most of your kind are so flummoxed all they can do is ask questions. Most of which I cannot answer,” she added, as an afterthought.
The boy placed a hand on his tummy. He grimaced and chewed his lip.
“Sure?” The voice was almost in his ear. “It is my burden to explain the unexplainable.”
“Well, I suppose there’s one thing.”
“Anything, dear boy. You shall have an eternity to dwell upon the answer, as has all mankind. For no one, not one soul, enters the realm above or below without first passing through purgatory. You might as well ask something to tide you over until you’re judged.”
The boy felt a stale wind assail his nostrils, heard the smacking of lips. It sparked something he just had to know.
“Tell me, Death, if that is who you are, was it the kippers or the eggs?”
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
There was no particular difference in our styles. We wrote as we were, evil and worse. Yet, there were discrepancies. Some might have termed them oddities.
Kara had a propensity to exaggerate situations. I had an inclination to err. Only when our shared editor pointed this out did we ourselves notice.
It became a farce, our correcting each other. Soon after, it became more, each desperate to put the other right. Our editor said it didn’t matter. But it did.
I tore up all her notepads. She snapped my pencils in half. I flushed her ink down the toilet. Kara laced mine with something she ought not; she knew I sucked my pen whilst thinking.
I died on a Monday. Kara spoke at my funeral just three days later. I rose from my coffin and laughed when she said how good a husband I’d been. Our editor, now her editor, laughed too.
Kara self-published her book; it was under-appreciated by others and overrated by her. I read it over a person’s shoulder whilst haunting a toilet. Neither the manuscript nor the toilet was clean.
When Kara joined me in the afterlife, we joked about it. Our editor was now God. Neither of us liked what he had to say.
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
I am very pleased to have had my short story ‘Moonscapes and Melancholy‘ published today by Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Those who know me will know I don’t make a big song and dance about such things, though I should, but this journal is a real beauty. I would encourage anyone who writes short prose, fiction and poetry to head over there and take a look at what they require.
Author’s Note: Corrine and the narrator here are current characters in progress for my next body of work. I hope you enjoy
I have no compunction to acquiesce to her wishes. Despite the provocation, I still love her. It is a dilemma.
The night surges around me like a redundant coal mine, the memories of such excavations as to tire an army of dwarves recalled, but discarded. It closes in. I am surrounded.
Her eyes appear first, always her eyes, flashing from this false midnight like two black holes. They hover, darker than dark, drawing in those vestiges of light surface dwellers take for granted, gorging. I would have them gorge on me, too, but have not the energy to ask.
Corrine has a flair for the dramatic, always had, in both life and death. She whispers sweet promises, offers life eternal, a never-ending dream, but is this not what God promises, too? Whether corporeal or incorporeal, one exists. The only decision to make, one unfortunately decided whilst the former presides, is where.
This deep darkness pools like a subterranean sea, tugs with a relentless persistence, one which wears. I capitulate. Corrine wins.
She is here, everywhere. I breathe her, filling my lungs with sorrow. She circulates my system, sluggish in blood made unctuous, taking a slow perusal of all I have to offer. I have nothing to offer, but it still takes time.
When I wake, it is to her raven self. She looms over me in a burgundy chamber, lit by a single black candle with a putrescent flame.
“Make it easier on yourself,” she coos, like a demented dove.
“No.”
“I ask nothing.”
“You ask everything.”
“I could take it.”
“No, my once darling, you cannot.”
I lay for interminable aeons debating this simple truth, as the cosmos unfolds around me, suns blinking in and out of view, universes unfolding like paper swans set loose in time’s ocean. She thinks it will break me, but it only strengthens my resolve. She should never have awoken me.
Corrine enters my perfect prison with a cup of cold water. Condensation drips down the glass like diamonds-made-emeralds in the unnatural light.
“Drink,” she says.
“I’d rather watch it.”
“You never gain anything by watching.”
“No, you gain everything.”
She throws the glass to the floor, but it fails to smash or spill a drop. It is as illusory as she, yet more substantial than ever I’ve been.
Light arrives in the form of a tangerine dawn. I soak up every vitamin, savour every second. There is something about a sparkling new day that transcends description. One must feel it, taste it, love it like there’ll never be another.
She is here.
Corrine snatches the memory from my thoughts and swallows it whole. A slug-like tongue circles her lips as if to ensure every atom sampled. She laughs the laugh of the lost, this demoness. She glares, flares twinned supernovas and is gone.
It takes time for reality to realign.
I climb from bed as though it just another day, throw aside the curtains to the orange skies of my dream.
The sun sits amongst them. It is black.
Love cannot be taken, nor shared unwillingly, nor even explained. One might see it and snatch it momentarily, nothing more. My love for the dawn was not my love for her, if ever it was love at all.
I resist the temptation to sleep this moonless evening. “Not tonight,” I say, as the devil tucks this damaged soul into bed. “I have no compunction to acquiesce to your wishes.” I haven’t. No, I haven’t.
But I have.
The End.
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
The feather weighed more than my soul, but less than my heart. That had to be true, didn’t it? I carried my soul around daily and never felt it once. You wouldn’t have known it was there. My heart, however, now that weighed tonnes. It often plunged through my torso like a sinking treasure chest to nestle in the oceanic depths of my gut. Sometimes, my heart even pounded like a fist against my ribcage, bruising and battering. The thing dragged me down when I sat and resisted me when I stood. My soul did none of these things. Yes, the feather in my hand was more like my soul than my heart. That’s why I took the former with me when I left the latter behind.
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash
There were no indications of illness, no — how does one say it — telltale signs. Not at first, anyway.
Her eyes were the key, how they darkened from a silver grey to near pitch, like storm clouds eclipsing the moon. Her mood moved the same, whereas mine remained cheery throughout. Another mistake.
She remained in bed most of the time, venturing out at night when I fell asleep, or pretended to. That’s when I’d follow her out onto the meadow and up the trancelike hill. She’d stand there and howl at the moon, unafraid and rabid. Others howled multiple returns, whilst I whimpered like a beaten puppy.
The first three months came and went in a flash of angry exchanges. The fourth marked a difference, as she chose not to speak, or simply forgot how. I tried harder to understand her then, but understood nothing.
They came for her when the supermoon kissed the meadow in argent beams. A glistening silver-white, it was like day had come to the night on the one night I’d sooner it darker than the abyss.
I loved my Marie. I loved her with all of my heart. She loved me the same. Perhaps that’s why she ate it?
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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