…and though the world fell all about like tarnished snowflakes shaved from an iron sky, I walked on. My father’s words rang through my ears in those moments, loud and true. How, when he’d lain there on his deathbed with nothing, having been nothing, having proven nothing, he’d still dared to influence my butterfly future. He’d pursed his lips together as though having eaten a lemon, his eyes squinting, and hissed, “Make do, son. It’s all you’re good for.” I’d closed his curtains and walked away. I never stopped.
…there was a truth in the recalled memory, but not my own. Mankind had made do and then panicked when realising themselves having stagnated. I, on the other hand, would never stagnate, for light always reaches the horizon, and then the next, and then another, until finally touching the shore. I would break upon hers, even if I walked through a thousand such chaotic nightmares. What other choice had I? That’s what lost souls were for.
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
Transparent times made for invisible people, and I was more invisible than most. Where others had lips, cheeks, chins and expressions, I had an outline that wavered as a golden mist. Where others had eyes, I had hollows, and it was in these where all my sorrows pooled.
To weep without salinity, tracks, or wetness, is to not weep at all, yet I did. The flow was constant and the craving for more irreversible. Perhaps this was what prompted my transition from nothing, to something, to more.
A ghost is the very personification of gone, so to make gone return, took effort. I strained every atom, recalled every memory, coalesced from that dream termed death. But return, I did.
My hands and feet came first, like an erased pencil sketch redrawn from somebody else’s perspective: I was not the me I once was. A fully formed torso and face came next; I touched them and wept some more. It was this that gave my true self away, the agony of my situation. There was still no water and no tear. When I touched at my eyes, they too were missing, my newly formed fingers passing straight into my hollow skull.
It was several days and close to midnight before I took the decision to stop trying. I hovered at the end of my once wife’s bed. She noticed.
The light flicked on before I could move, and there I was facing the mirror, or rather, most of me was. I fled.
I still haunted our old house long after Karen passed. My wife never came back. I tormented those others, then those after them, and then many more. I waited for the one who might have my eyes, but, of course, I never saw them.
Thank you for reading Richard
Richard M. Ankers
Author of the brand new steampunk extravaganza Britannia Unleashed.
“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.
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.
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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