Silent Bombs Falling On Green Grass , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Russell Mardell

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95 pages

English

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Silent Bombs Falling On Green Grass is an intriguing collection of stories. It spans a wide selection of genres, from comedy to the surreal, to horror and drama. Written in a way that plays with structure and expectations it presents an unpredictable world where the reader is never quite sure how the story will unfold. Welcome to Mewlish Lull, the sort of town you pass through on your way to somewhere else without even noticing it exists. This debut collection of short fiction presents a bizarre portrait of a world just to the left of reality. In twelve stories and with a cast of oddball characters, through the most absurd of comedies, the darkest of nightmares and those quiet moments of madness that live within us all, Silent Bombs Falling on Green Grass takes us to a strange town where anything could happen... If only you could fit in. But sometimes being an outsider is the only way to be...

Sujets

Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)

Short story

Fantasy

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	01 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781848769779
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Russell Mardell is a playwright, scriptwriter and filmmaker based in the South West of England. Silent Bombs Falling On Green Grass is his first collection of stories. Stage plays include: Verses, Charlie Lightly, Freestate, The Seventeenth Valentine and Cool Blokes: Decent Suits.
For more information visit www.russellmardell.co.uk
SILENT BOMBS FALLING ON GREEN GRASS
RUSSELL MARDELL
Copyright 2010 Russell Mardell
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador 5 Weir Road Kibworth Beauchamp Leicester LE8 0LQ, UK Tel: ( 44) 116 279 2299 Fax: ( 44) 116 279 2277 Email: books@troubador.co.uk Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1848765 139
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image by David Baker
Typeset in 11pt Gaillard BT by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For B and The Millies
Some folks are drawn to the flames And some just want to hide But the lonely are the prettiest of all They burn from the inside.
- Thea Gilmore The List
Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTES FROM MEWLISH LULL - RAIN
ARMAND GULL DRINKS WHISKEY
FARRINGDON
NOTES FROM MEWLISH LULL - STAN S MATE
POSTSCRIPT
FOUR DOORS DOWN
THE INN AT HEROES RIDGE
BUBBLEGUM BANANAS
NOTES FROM MEWLISH LULL - SMILER DESMOND IS DEAD
POSTSCRIPT
ASCENSION
SILENT BOMBS FALLING ON GREEN GRASS
THE KINGS OF THE CASTLE
NOTES FROM MEWLISH LULL - DAFFODIL
NOTES FROM MEWLISH LULL - RAIN
It was raining. That was my most vivid recollection of the day I arrived. Thick sheets of rain cutting a steamy wave through the humid air of the fag end of an Indian summer. It didn t seem like rain. Didn t feel like weather. It was a statement maybe, a shield around this little world keeping others out and keeping us in.
The train journey from where I had been to where I was going had been long and irritating. People filled each carriage, sitting, standing and sighing. Arses and elbows were far too near to me, a vulgar smell of food and child was in the air. It couldn t have been healthy. I kept turning to the window, searching for a view to take me away from the tedium but the rain was keeping all that back. I saw only my face and the bony frame of the corpse next to me.
An obese child in a cowboy hat and sheriff s badge was shooting people with a plastic gun, whilst dribbling from one side of a confusingly small mouth and spitting out gunshot sounds from the other. Something had congealed around one of his jowls. His mother, or at least the woman next to him, was cackling fishwife banter into a mobile phone and gently pushing him back into his seat whenever he got too close. The boy shot his mother (or at least the woman sitting next to him) and laughed. Snot escaped. I found myself hoping that this child would never hold a job of importance to society. Let him eat cake and die on a sofa.
Despite the lack of space and the people lining the aisle, the refreshment trolley was making its rounds, pushed by a spiky haired adolescent mumbling to his feet and looking embarrassed. Some man shouted at him after he clipped his ankle with the trolley wheel and a long woman was buying nuts. The corpse leaned forward as if to speak, hit his head on the seat in front, swayed and fell back. The porn mag in his hands slipped free and landed on the floor.
Some bright spark at the front of the carriage persuaded the adolescent to open one of the windows. Despite appearances there was a strong wind blowing somewhere and the carriage suddenly came alive; a suit s papers blew back into his face, the child s cowboy hat flew back from his head, swinging on a rope cord around his neck, and somewhere further down a toup e danced around suspended in mid air. No one seemed in any rush to reclaim it. The breeze looked to be having the same effect on everyone else as it was on me. It tasted good and nothing else seemed to matter. It was clean. It was freedom. I decided to get off at the next stop wherever it was. It would be as good a place to start again as anywhere else.
I didn t know how many hours I had been on the train, could have been four, could have been more. I counted at least two then my mind had been infiltrated by the inanity all around me and had started firing off at tangents. Now nothing made sense. I thought back to the city I had left and the sights I had seen. The trouble I had caused and the trouble I had dodged.
Waiting at the train station to get out of that last city had been a test of endurance. Society had laid itself bare in all its many shapes and sizes and I had felt a surge of repulsion so immense I had wanted to stand in the middle of the station screaming at people. The men in collars and ties with their ghostly stares and once ravenous eyes, they were the worst. The living dead in expensive clothes. Fanatics for a religion without the comforting weight of trying to do good. I had seen couples kissing and whispering things they believed in, young love not yet an old joke. An old man had been in the middle of the station singing a standard to anyone that would listen, adjacent to him a beggar and a posh sort had gone at each other with aggression and style, and a bride had sunk to her knees in tears, her pristine and elaborate wedding dress a hopeful wink in a black eye.
The train station was an art gallery where everyone was putting themselves on display. Human life with all its traits, ticks and horrors dripping from every square foot and no one giving a damn. I had watched from over the lip of my coffee cup counting down the seconds until the train, until I could get out, get somewhere else and start again. I knew it would be no different wherever I went but life s pantomime in different scenery was all that was on offer. I paid my money just like the next man, but the next man was a corpse.
The train jolted slightly and the corpse lolled over and let his head dangle in the aisle, his right arm turning in the air and landing with a hearty slap on the thigh of a gargantuan lady on the opposite seat. She seemed to enjoy it and left it a good minute before delicately putting it back from where it had come. She left his head bobbing around in the aisle. Her weight had proved she had her priorities all wrong and she clearly had no desire to work against type. I gave her a quick glance. This was all that was possible without illness. Her skirt was the smallest kind I had ever seen and were I able to believe she had a mauve chuff I may even have doubted its existence at all. Why the portly need to dress like the tiny has been a mystery I have never fathomed. When you are dealing with delusions of vanity there is seldom an answer that makes sense.
After another hour that could have been ten minutes, the next train station on the journey bled into sight from around the curtain of rain and I stood and carefully pushed past the corpse. His head was still in the aisle and he looked as if he was trying to stare up skirts. I stepped out under a gravestone sky and looked around. I was one of only five to get off and that pleased me. I wanted it to be a station where people left and rarely arrived. I couldn t see the name of the station. No sign was visible, just a wall, a bench and a small woman in a small booth selling coffee in small cups. Two men in suits hurried past at pace and disappeared down an underpass that ran up between the station s two platforms. The others that got off at the same time, were a woman with a large rucksack and bottle glasses who was scrutinising a map and a woman in, I reckoned, her early thirties who was stood across the platform staring at me. I looked back at the train and saw the corpse had been placed upright again and was staring out at the platform with a grin. The train started throbbing and began to pull away. The map-reading woman suddenly screamed and started banging on the train doors.
Not here she was shouting, please, not here She followed the train until the platform ended and then gave one last scream before sinking to her knees and sobbing.
I say the same thing every day. It was the woman - early thirties - that had got off the train with me. Every damn day I say that. Not here I say. Every day. Makes no difference. No one listens anyway.
You aren t saying it to yourself then?
Of course I m saying it to myself. I told you, no one listens.
You obviously listen. That s a start.
Yes but I don t find myself very interesting.
She left. As she walked down the underpass she looked back briefly and I smiled. It hurt my face.
There was some graffiti halfway down the middle section of the underpass on the right hand wall that somewhat proudly claimed THIS TOWN KILLS ITS KIDS. It was written, or rather scrawled, in what looked like charcoal. They were words from an adult hand. I stood looking at it for a moment then found my attention being drawn to a man lying face down in the middle of the floor of the underpass. His right arm and right leg stuck out in the beginnings of a star shape, his left arm and leg tucked away into his body. His clothes bore designer labels and every spare inch of skin must have been liberally doused in aftershave, as the rich, interfering smell was evident even over the eye-watering stench of urine that hung through the underpass.
What are you doing? As first lines go it wasn t