Exclusive story: Memory - nothing else; Vegas is Vegas, babY - my latest TOME; Poem: Die 1000 Times; Water Buffalo; Make this post ALL FREE; Tales From The UniversE 54 - newsletter from Ancoats
An arcadia of imagination
Welcome - and thanks to all my new and cool as cool non-paying and paying subscribers. Any comments, love, free money, etcetera, let me know in the bit at the end please.
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1. Vegas is Vegas, babY
My latest book is NOW on my substack - in four parts:
Manchester United's summer 2023 tour of New York, New Jersey, San Diego, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas penned my way.
The first part is FREE; the rest the £4.99 a-month subscription for which you receive everything else paid for on here. Second part HERE.
2. Short Story
Memory - nothing else
The party was in the empty farmhouse on Longfello Curve on the hill to Pott Shrigley. She pulled up and got out her silver 2001 X-Type Jag and took the box of records out the boot and walked the path to the farmhouse where someone placed candles that lighted the way lilywhite, flames puttering in cool early spring air.
She reached inside. She would always be reaching inside somewhere. The decks were set up in what had been the kitchen on what had been the communal island at centre in a wide space that through the derelict walls ranged into what she saw as she put the records down had been the living room and would be where the dancing would happen.
Disco lights hung from the ceiling and more on cables strung across two cracked and stained sinks and their draining boards and got juiced from a dieselfuelled generator as too would the decks and mixer and amp and speakers and DJ monitor.
She said, ‘Everyone has their own ideas and I’ve had enough of mine.’
She wore a leather Barbour jacket that went to the waist and was belted and showed brasscoloured buckles at the epaulettes and she drew a 9oz pewter hip flask from a breast pocket, unscrewed the top, did a slug of brandy and closed the flask up and put this away.
She was 15 years old. She said, ‘Keep your memories safe’, and felt the flare of the liquor as if the kitchen and her records and the rig primed for the party glowed internal and she the same. It was gone 6pm and the augury of the new spring was present in the light that dipped and held its glow through the windows that were smashed and jagged at their corners or nonexistent at all, the frames rotted and denuded in their recesses.
She said ‘today’s adventure is tomorrow’s prison’ and she saw in the glow a childhood scene when she was 7 years old having been from a younger age sensitive to the small and larger defeats her father suffered and she was in her bedroom, her father downstairs, and the sound he made an awful keening that came up through the floorboards from the living room and she could not go to him to stop him crying because she was stopped by something and she heard him say to the empty room ‘oh my baby Sheena I’m sorry for your clothes, that you go to school dressed as what we are - poor.’
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