(CONTENT WARNING: Disturbing misogyny in poem form)
Rudgethorpe (Chapter One, Introduction, page 5, and Part One, pages 1 and 2)
Rudgethorpe (Chapter One, Introduction, pages three and four)
(Being an adaptation of something I’ve posted before)
Rudgethorpe (Chapter One, Introduction, page two)
Leader of the Pack
I am almost certainly not the first person to make this joke.
(Vintage “Twilight” reference, circa 2009)
Rudgethorpe (Chapter One, Introduction, page one)
The Incredibly Lazy Film Company
Ways to Cope with the Land’s Absence
(sequel to “There Was a Land)
*
Pretend it never happened.
Pretend it never was.
Pretend you don’t remember it
And couldn’t give a toss.
(OR…)
Try to recreate it.
Try to fill the gaps.
Try to seek out things you love
Behind your parents’ back.
(OR…)
Be sure to hide your feelings.
Be sure to keep them hidden.
Be sure that you pretend to smile
And do your parents’ bidding.
(OR…)
Say you’re glad it happened.
Say you’re glad it’s gone.
Say you know it’s for the best;
To love the land was wrong.
(OR…)
Throw a massive tantrum.
Throw things to the ground.
Throw their actions in their face.
Repay them, pound for pound.
(…)
Let’s say there were five children
In that empty room,
Now white and cold and featureless,
And silent as a tomb.
These were all five children,
With their virtues and their crimes,
And maybe there were five in all
Or one at different times.
Wenceslas Avenue- A Field Guide (Numbers 222 and 198)
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I clean houses on the lower section of Wenceslas Avenue- 190-220 on the right, 191-222 on the left. And that means that I get to go into people’s houses while they’re away and see what strange things they keep in there.
Here are a few of them.
Number 222- The one with the locked door
When I started cleaning here, the owners left me a note to say that it was very important for me to never go into the spare room upstairs with the locked door. There was a set of keys on the table, with the one for the spare room already labelled, so I’d know which one not to use.
So every time I go into this house, I clean every other room, but I leave the one with the locked door alone. Once or twice, when I was vacuuming the upstairs hallway, I smelled something bad- stale food or something- and whatever was causing it was definitely behind that door, because I left that house spotless. So I left the owners a note telling them about it and asking if they were absolutely certain about me not cleaning in there.
They replied. I was never to go into that room. I was never even to open the door. So I shrugged my shoulders and left whatever was in there to its own devices.
A week after that, I went upstairs and saw a puddle of red liquid oozing out from under the locked door. It was the kind of bright red that’s dangerously close to pink, and it made the entire upstairs hallway smell of syrup. It’s honestly getting kind of sad at this point.
Number 198- The one with the excitable dog and the even more excitable old lady
The first time I came here, the dog- Sprocket- decided to launch himself into my stomach, nose-first, the second I opened the door. “Oh, he does that with everybody!” said the old lady as she pulled him away, “I’ll put him out in the garden for you.” So that’s how it’s been ever since, Sprocket howling and throwing himself at the back door while I clean the kitchen. Of course, sometimes Sprocket gets drowned out by his owner.
Her name is Dorothy, and she lived in the house with her son and daughter-in-law. She’s nearly eighty, she doesn’t trust food that’s not from Sainsbury’s, she thinks it’s a tragedy that children don’t do PE in school anymore (I’ve told her I’m pretty sure they do, but she didn’t seem to hear me), she really hates Graham Norton, she can tell everything she needs to know about a man from the way he ties his shoes, and she wishes she was back in the old days where you knew where you stood and there weren’t so many foreigners about.
Lately, she’s been telling me that her daughter-in-law is a scheming gold-digger who’s out to drive a wedge between her and her son. By sheer coincidence, she has three other children, and they’re all married to scheming gold-diggers, too. Personally, I think she has to accept some blame for raising them to have such terrible taste.
Wenceslas Avenue- A Field Guide by Crystal Gramercy (Numbers 191, 210 and 200)
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I clean houses on the lower section of Wenceslas Avenue- 190-220 on the right, 191-222 on the left. And that means that I get to go into people’s houses while they’re away and see what strange things they keep in there.
Here are a few of them.
Number 191- the one that looks like a doll’s house
And I’m not talking about a classy Victorian doll’s house with delicately carved furnishings. I’m talking Barbie, Polly Pocket, fluorescent pink vinyl, holographic designs all over the kitchen, every other surface covered in cushiony velvet. Everything is candy-coloured, even things like the fridge and the oven. There’s a sweet fruity smell wafting through the rooms. There are little paintings of hearts or stars in some of the corners.
Unfortunately, it’s also like a kid’s toy in another way- after you’ve played with it too many times, it gets all faded and scuffed. There are scratches on the holographic surfaces and tears in the velvet. There are chips in the walls and stains that never quite come out. Everything near the windows is about three shades paler than the things around it. Honestly, it’s kind of sad. They say nothing gold can stay, and I guess nothing fluorescent pink can, either.
Number 210- the one with all the taxidermy
To be fair, there’s only three taxidermy things (the ferret on the mantelpiece, the owl in the hallway, and the cross-eyed fox in the dining room), but honestly I think just one would have been enough. They sit about, gathering dust (til I get there), glassily watching the world go by. At least the clowns across the road get rearranged now and then.
Most of the rest of the rooms are full of leather-upholstered furniture, all ancient and cracking. It’s a good thing you never hear about animals becoming poltergeists, because if they did, you’d have the ghosts of about twelve cows and half the cast of The Gruffalo coming by every night to smash up the place.
Number 200- the one with the doting parents
The son of the couple who live here is called Thomas. I know this because the whole house is a damn shrine to him.
School pictures. Certificates. Trophies, both sporting and academic. I’m guessing that Thomas is an only child, because if there were any siblings who had to live with so many constant reminders of his brilliance, they’d have assassinated him long ago.
Meanwhile, upstairs, there is a bedroom full of school supplies, computer games, and movie posters; and that particular room always has at least three full cans of Carlsberg hidden under the bed. I’m not planning to tell his parents. Thomas has a stressful life.
Every single Reddit story
I (F25) have been with my fiance (M34) for three months. Everything’s been great… except for his mother (F804). She has never had a nice word to say about me. She’s convinced that I’m a gold digger, even though when we met I was a successful heart surgeon and he was unemployed and lived in a pigsty where the pigs gave him a discount on the rent because the straw was prickly.
Fast forward to this week, and his mother offers to take my daughter (F8) out to the zoo. I wasn’t sure about this, but my fiancé convinced me that it would be a good thing for the two of them to bond. She came back four hours later, WITHOUT my daughter, but WITH an elderly sausage dog (F12). At first, she refused to admit that anything was wrong, saying that my daughter had always looked like that and that maybe if I fed her better she wouldn’t be so small. Eventually, though, she admitted that she’d swapped my daughter for the dog, as she believed that the dog was “more suitable for our station in life.” I instantly ran out to look for her.
Eventually, I came across a confused-looking family trying to walk my daughter on a lead. I apologised for the confusion, gave them their dog back, and took my daughter home. She’d developed an irresistible urge to gnaw on any bones she found, but was otherwise unharmed.
Since then, my fiancé has been giving me the silent treatment. He says that I was out of line haranguing his mother like that, and he expected her to be respected in his house: I pointed out that it’s MY house, and he still sleeps at the pigsty three nights a week because he wants to keep his options open. He said to stop changing the subject.
One thing I should probably mention is that he was originally the fiancé of my sister (F16) who spontaneously combusted last July. We bonded through our grief, and I feel he may still be processing some of it. Should I apologise, or give him some space?
camelwithout 