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I'm a spec fic writer and artist. Wearing either hat my work tends towards the strange. Sometimes it's dark and decadent strange, sometimes more whimsical. As a reader I look for vivid characterisation and strong evocation of place. Surrealism is always welcome on my shelves, and I love comedy. My influences include everything I've ever read, watched, listened to, or eaten.
If you're interested in I'm a spec fic writer and artist. If you're interested in my art, I have an Etsy shop: Trivia About Saving the Gleefu No trivia or quizzes yet. I bound his wounds with clean rags and tried to feed him, but he had no appetite, despite his steady good cheer.
Saving the Gleeful Horse
It became clear to me that I would have to take the bus out to Barrage Cross to get help from near there. I went in the early morning and carried the Gleeful Horse in a string bag. From the Barrage Cross shops I walked out of the village, into the trees, and down the little grey weedy paths through the birch and buckthorn, going by the way that leads to the Garth of the Aorist: As you must, I walked around the cloister with the sun a certain number of times, then against the sun another number, then with the sun again, so that the brambles withdrew underground, all the thorny bundles coming apart and slithering below in one rush as if a giant in the earth had them on a rope the effect on the eye is striking.
After this, where all was a wild saw-toothed muddle just a moment or two ago, in another moment the lawn of trefoil and clover grew, which grows no matter the season—as dainty a green spread as you could wish for a picnic or a wedding. Upon the grass, as settled as a hen in the middle of the sweet-smelling lawn, there appeared the dwelling that appears: Whoever first painted the omen-card where she is shown as a figure seated with legs crosswise in front of a painted hearth must have seen her, or been advised by someone who had; at any rate, I have never found her arranged other than in this wise when I come to her house.
What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular, wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic. When she taps on his bandaged belly with a sharp knuckle he only rolls his eye and winks at me. Her parsnip-white fingers find something under his tongue. A toy—a plastic ring with a false emerald.
She shows it to me and puts it back. My poor horse, having to hang onto that uncomfortable lump. I suppose that if he swallowed it, it might fall out one of the holes in his side when the bandages I put on come loose, as they not infrequently do.
See a Problem?
But instead, she tells me:. And in one world this animal has life, and you see it, and I see it, but in the other world it has no life, it is a thing. Your eyes have a picture of cruelty on the inside. You see that picture clearly, and because of it, see other things unclearly. I think of what I might say and choose silence.
When I think of how that picture came to be there on the inside of my eyes, I am certain beyond any possibility of error that children know what is alive, and moreover that they are disposed to do harm with this knowledge. The unstrung gesture is not one that should belong to her.
Thankfully, both motions cease and she retires her hands to her sides again—they look better hanging than twitching. She was old a long time ago, and her life has certainly had its ups and downs. Or that she is changing. I try to think of nothing, while her eyes move back and forth under the cataracts, probably following the movements of figures she sees in her head.
So perhaps she wants to bargain, after all, and has a peculiar way of saying so today.
Saving the Gleeful Horse by K.J. Bishop
Rather than blame herself she blamed her armies and cursed those of her loyal men who were left alive. She cast a spell that pushed them into the chalk hills like raisins in a pudding, so that they all died in the white dark. After that she slept, and was captured whilst asleep. She was to have been hung and burnt, but she escaped—by means of a bargain with Prince November himself. Prince November keeps her there. Gossip says he drinks knowledge from the vein on her forehead at night and uses it for his business in the world.
But if I had some thoughts that glimmered a little? Perhaps she wants payment or part-payment in that coin.
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She is getting fretful, it may be, like a bored child, sick of her boxed-in life, and wants to hear a wonder-tale. I would rather believe that than believe she has changed, or is changing. The gist is that my Gleeful Horse will bring this happiness back to us. Or the beginning of the tale grows, anyway, issuing from me like a run of notes from a whistle. I use my best words—words and devices of speech I have heard during my life and remembered for their decorative and noble effects but have never had occasion to use aloud.
In the glare of her cataracts, my story lies dead. If it had been a treasure animal it would have been not beaten with wooden weapons but dispatched in an instant with one swing of a real sword. I want to cry out that this is not a game. Of course, if I tried something so mad, she might drum me into the ground like the biggest raisin of all. I feel sick, not for my sake but for the sake of my horse, whose winking eye shows how little he understands. But I hearken to what she tells me, now that she is speaking about the Gleeful Horse.
But I know on your behalf. The future will work through you, Molimus. Who would have imagined that? Replenish his treasures—you have your work, Molimus the Great.
Your Non-Denominational Source for The Weird
In the world inside him, they are more like stars. It is elements—starlike pieces—of this sort that you must gather and feed to him. He has one left, as you saw. One is not enough. I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits there with us.
Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor, where its stones of pure false red blink sleepily in the weak sun that has placed one foot through the opening in the wall. Within every living thing is a starlike piece. Those within human beings are bright, and those within children are the brightest of all. As people age, the starlike parts grow dim as though with distance, except in the cases of certain geniuses and halfwits.
The Wine of Smoke was acquired by her, hundreds of years ago, from a man who combined the talents of wizard and vintner, who had come to the Garth of the Aorist to bargain with her.