The Last Solstice

Happy solstice! Here's a song for the occasion, and a story too. If we are at vaguely comparable latitudes, congratulations on making it through the darkest bit. If we don't, or you are reading this at a later date, congratulations anyway: I'm quite sure you will have made it through something.

I was sorry to hear this week that Inner Worlds, a very fine speculative fiction magazine, will be closing after its next issue. All of their previous issues are available to read for free online, so do give them your eyeballs as a farewell gift, and look out for the final issue next year.

See you in the strange mushy period between Christmas and the new year. I will try to remember what day of the week it is, so I know when to post.

This week's daily stories

Monday

A nail half in. A board primed and unpainted. A window open, just to let the air in, with the snow blowing through. Pencil marks on walls and a dust sheet on the floor. A glass, empty but for the fine white residue that clings to it. A radio still playing. A phone long dead. A pair of boots. The earth still moving beneath.

Tuesday

The ghost-hunter had a battered buzzing gadget, a metal thing from the seventies with a chunky handle to support the weight of its huge batteries, and a wand on a coiled wire. He said the tricky thing was calibrating it. The dead are everywhere, you see, so it takes just the right level of sensitivity to find the spirit you’re looking for against the background haunting. He traced the shape of a frail young body in the air, the piezo howling. What do we do now we’ve found it? we asked him. He shrugged, and tucked the wand back in its holder. Just sit, and know she’s there, he said.

Wednesday

The alarm had been ringing for twenty minutes, but nobody knew what it was for. “It has the rhythm of catastrophe,” opined Jeremy, “but not the timbre.” Jenny closed her eyes and raised a finger for quiet. “I heard something like this once before,” she said after half a minute. “I think it was for ‘man overboard’.” We were not at sea, but we thought this got us closer. We decided to take five minutes to write down our ideas. Then we would reconvene and discuss. But it was very hard to think with all that noise going on, and by the time we came back together, it had stopped.

Thursday

A week into the job, I still hadn’t met a person. I was working my way through the induction training: uncanny voiceovers about health and safety and data protection, backed up by questions a block of wood could answer. Automated emails delivered accounts, reassurances, and promises of tasks to come. Then payday came, with payslip but no pay. With no manager to my name, I found the head of HR on the company website and fired off an email. No reply. Looking longer, her photo was uncanny: an emptiness behind the eyes, and not in the way of my last job’s HR manager. I searched her up, and a few other staff, and found nothing. Fake people, fake company, fake job. Lying in the next day, I still felt guilty.

Friday

The pumpkin wouldn’t rot. We had promised Benjamin that it could stay on the step until it started to smell, but it looked better than ever. The scuffs I made trying to get the top off had healed up. It must have been the cold weather.

One day, I left the house to find it glowing in the dark December morning. I looked at it, and it turned towards me, and its horrid little mouth said “Merry Christmas”. My boot went out to kick it away, but I stopped myself. We promised Benjamin.

Saturday

A year later, I made my way to the appointed place. The Green Knight was waiting in the dawn mist, axe in hand. I knelt, and bared my neck, and he struck my head clean off. He posted it that afternoon, Epic Beheading Prank GONE WRONG! Knight Gets Karma After One Year, two million views for my grimacing face, top comment “0:21 this dudes wearing a green gurdel, bet he thought it was magic”. When I returned to Camelot, head in hands, they were all watching it and laughing.

Sunday

It was a dismal old cookbook, everything brown and grey and set in jelly, but it was all we had left of her. We made it all. Every grim dish of hard-boiled pork, every sickly marshmallow salad. It didn’t bring back so much as a whisper of her. But it was absolutely delicious.

I have been reading...

I'm still working my way through Never Again. It's not a long book, but it's not easy to read, and I find if I read too much of it at once then Oulipesque eccentricities infect M.T.'s quotidian missives.

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This week's story: The Last Solstice

That solstice we beat back the darkness for good. We built up bigger bonfires and gave up all the year's spoils. We tormented our flesh even as we indulged it. The old ways had always been the right ones. We had just been holding too much back.

We didn't know at first. We licked our wounds and ate our meagre rations and the days grew longer the way they always do. I picked snowdrops for Robert and daffodils for Kathyrn and looked forward to long summer days by the lake. I know that the only darkness you can sing out of the world is the darkness in your own heart. I know that. Or I knew it.

Those long days by the lake never came. It was hard to get warm and slow to get dry after dipping, and the sun always set before the best talk started. It was a strange year: it seemed to pass all at once. You forgot whether you were living yesterday or tomorrow or today, and after a while you stopped worrying about it. It made no difference anyhow. The winter came, and we gathered close by our fires, but we burned them low, and in the mild air we soon drifted away from each other.