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Storage of stories written for The Bradbury, 2025. |
| Various stories created at the (hopeful) rate of one a week for the year 2025, |
 Dragon Aloysius Prendergast considered himself a dragon. As far as he knew, he had all the requisite qualities. He was repellant in looks, antisocial in behaviour, prickly in temper, and interested in damsels only to the extent to which they were useful. Not that he was in some sort of delusion on the matter. He was quite sane (as most dragons are, he assured himself) and used the comparison merely to claim an identity that explained his circumstances. The most essential of these was solitude. More than anything else, Aloysius was alone. His family had never been close and now lived so far away that all contact had been lost. He had no friends and even acquaintances were few and purely the result of necessity. Which is how Aloysius preferred it. In all his reading about dragons, he had never come across one that enjoyed company, even that of other dragons. So it was not chance that gave rise to his conviction that he was a dragon. The very fact that he enjoyed being alone struck him as being the quality common to all the dragons he had studied. After that realisation, it was natural that he should collect other evidences of his dragonness. And they were many. Aloysius’ profession might not be considered particularly dragonish. Accountants are not usually feared as powerful and dangerous beasts. But closer inspection would reveal that they are extremely interested in treasure, especially that of others. And, in some cases, they are uniquely positioned to take advantage of their proximity to the wealth of their clients. Let us suppose that Aloysius was not above making use of his advantages in this regard and had amassed, as a consequence, a pile that any dragon would be respect. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Aloysius was wealthy beyond the expectations of most accountants. In this, too, he was particularly dragonlike in that he did not waste his treasure in the pursuit of comforts or fripperies. In true dragon fashion, he sat upon it and guarded it jealously. The fact that Aloysius could not fly and so lacked a dragonish ability did not concern him at all. From his researches he knew that many dragons did not fly. Thus it was that another name for them was “wyrms.” The most obvious shortcoming in his adoption of dragonness was the lack of captured damsels. In his younger days, Aloysius had managed to ensnare a few damsels who could see beyond his unappealing looks (perhaps to the wealth behind them), but these had soon been repelled by his abhorrent nature. Inevitably, they had escaped without needing even the intervention of some passing knight upon a white steed. Aloysius consoled himself with the thought that, sooner or later, one more was bound to fall into his clutches and he would then use more assertive techniques to enslave her. Time was slipping by, however. Thus it was that, when the opportunity finally presented itself, Aloysius was unprepared and thrown into indecision in the moment. It happened on the day that he had chosen to wander down to the corner shop to buy something to read. He was over halfway there when he spotted the damsel, kneeling down at the side of her car and trying to remove one of wheels. A quick glance around confirmed for Aloysius that there were no knights about. This would be impossibly easy, he thought. There was still some distance to travel before he reached the damsel, and Aloysius considered the situation as he approached. She was a pretty young thing, well up to the task of fulfilling her role in the affair. And, quite clearly, she was struggling with the task of wheel removal, handling it as though determined not to damage a nail in the process. This was going to be too easy. Aloysius was close now and realised that things were not going to be as easy as he had first supposed. If he grabbed her and started to drag her back to the house, he was bound to be seen by some busybody. The matter would have to be a good deal more subtle than that, something more akin to his rare attempts in the past. So much for the aggressive approach, he mused. Perhaps the best was to offer assistance and then use a little persuasion and the offer of refreshment to get her back to the house. Yes, that would do it. He was right by her now and she turned her head to look up at him. There was no disguising the fright in those big, blue eyes on her first impression of the unpleasant sight that was Aloysius. He attempted a smile. “Do you need assistance?” he asked. She released the wheel and stood up. “Oh yes, if you don’t mind. I’ve never changed a wheel before.” This was going to be easy. The girl was clearly out of her depth and eager for help from any direction. She stared at him innocently, quite over her initial surprise and relieved at his intervention. Aloysius wrestled the wheel off its lugs and replaced it with the spare. The girl watched closely, as though memorising the procedure for future occasions. Her perfume filtered into Aloysius’ nostrils. He tightened the wheelnuts and let the car off its jack, taking everything to the rear of the car and placing them in the trunk. She followed, thanking him profusely. Then she said something that gave him pause. “You’re my knight in shining armour.” Aloysius looked at her in horror. The moment she said it, he knew it was true. Somehow his role had been swapped and, without realising it, he had become the sworn enemy of all things dragon. His entire being raged at the insult, the fickleness of fate that had brought him to this point. He stared at her, confused, and all thoughts of capturing her driven from his mind. She was still talking away, rapt in her gratitude, eyes sparkling, soft skin shining with happiness, and voice lyrical in the morning atmosphere. And now she was moving past him, opening the car door and getting in, still talking. He stood like a statue, unable to act. The window hummed down and she turned to offer her goodbyes. The engine burst into life. Aloysius could do no more than wave a hand, his tongue immobile in his mouth and mind still shattered by his conversion. She turned away and the car moved off. Sir Aloysius Dragonkiller staggered back the way he had come. Word count: 1092 For The Bradbury, Week 3 2025 |
| The Glove There was a glove lying on the floor in the corridor. It was a black leatherette shape, very flat, to one side of the passage and very close to the wall. Ransom stopped to consider it. The size of the glove suggested it would fit a lady’s hand, rather than a man’s. And the long, elbow length gauntlet reinforced this impression. Unlikely to belong to the Boy, therefore, especially now that he was grown to be a man. This made it difficult to explain its presence however. Ransom stood for a moment in thought. The glove’s situation in so unlikely a place suggested a sudden abandonment, as though peeled from its hand in haste while the owner proceeded quickly along the passage. Too quickly for its twin to have been disposed of in similar manner. This raised the problem of where an apparently elegant young woman would be heading in such a hurry. The corridor led only to the bedrooms, one for Ransom and his wife, the other for the Boy. Which suggested that the Boy might have found himself a girlfriend. Of presumed sophistication, judging by the rarity of such gloves these days. That was surprising enough, since there had been no hint of such an acquisition in the Boy’s talk or behaviour recently. One would have expected there to be some sign of a change in the fellow when in the grip of so new an enterprise. And then there was the obvious hurry in which the lady had been involved, by all appearances. It did not tax his imagination too much to come to an embarrassing conclusion in this regard. Such haste was not on account of an urgent need to see Ransom’s bedroom, after all, especially when she seemed to be undressing on the way. Well, well, thought Ransom. Who would have thought the Boy capable of it? Still, it was bound to happen sooner or later. He continued on his way down the corridor. His wife, Marion, was in the living room, working on the quilt she was making. “Oddest thing just happened to me in the passage,” announced Ransom as he entered the room. She did not look up from her work. “What was that then?” “There’s a glove lying on the floor of the passage. Long black thing, certainly not one of ours. Thought it looked a bit out of place.” Marion looked up. “Oh that,” she said. “It’s the Girl’s.” Ransom frowned. “But she hasn’t lived here for years. What the hell is one of her gloves doing here? “It was amongst a whole heap of her stuff that she left in the spare room,” she explained. “I was moving it to put everything in our bedroom closet when the glove fell off the top. I left it there to see if anyone would pick it up for me.” “Fat chance of that. I’d have picked it up but then I’d only have put it in the wrong place.” She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Without fail,” she said. Ransom collapsed into an armchair. “Much preferred my glove story,” he muttered. Word count: 523 For The Bradbury, Week 2. |
 Old Man Ray Burlingham was tired. This was nothing new for he had been tired many times before. But it was a special brand of weariness that had become familiar over the years. At the age of sixty-seven he had been aware that old age was catching up to him. And the main component of this was the feeling of being bone weary as never before. Ten years later he was worse. He felt exhausted by the process of living through day after day, time stretching before him into a grey, insubstantial future with nothing to look forward to but more weariness on the brink of exhaustion. Aches and pains came and went but this perpetual tiredness was getting him down. Not that he had nothing to do. Most of his waking moments were spent at the computer, allowing his curiosity to lead him into diverse areas of knowledge, some new and others lifelong, always expanding his vision of a world now closed to him. It was a poor substitute for living, however. At eighty-seven the memory of his grandmother returned to him during one of his attempts at escape into the past. Once again he saw her lifting her frail frame from the easy chair with pain, then making her slow way across the floor to peer at the mantelpiece clock. “What time is it?” The familiar words hung in the air as they did every day, a ritual of the beginning of every bedtime. She had lived to the age of ninety-seven. The prospect of repeating that performance was too much for Ray. He already felt that his existence was so dogged by fatigue that life was hardly worth living. There was no way he could imagine living another ten years to experience life at his grandmother’s age. It really was time to go. And that, of course, was the problem. Easy enough to say it out loud like that, not so easy to somehow make it happen. Apart from the sheer difficulty of the mechanics involved, he knew it was forbidden, an escape route expressly denied to one who knew the Living God. It seemed that the only recourse was to wait for the body to give up, to surrender at last whatever feeble drive to live remained and to release this grip upon a life that had surely run its course by now. A pity then that his annual visits to his doctor invariably returned much the same results from the samples submitted for examination. The man was determined to keep him healthy regardless of Ray’s waning interest in the matter, and it seemed that his body had reached some sort of plateau where degeneration became so slow that it could hardly be detected. The doctor smiled in satisfaction while Ray contemplated another year of sheer, monotonous lethargy. Ray stood at the window, staring out at the world beyond the narrow boundaries of his dwindling life. Not much was happening out there as well. A last leaf separated itself from its grasp on the branch and drifted down in erratic course to the ground. Across the street, Mrs Darnley was sweeping the dust from her doorstep. Otherwise nothing moved in the dull landscape under an overcast sky. The old man turned away to his thoughts again. He supposed that he could go to the source with his problem. After all, God should know best about the reason for the prohibition. Not that Ray had no idea on the subject but it would be good to at least discuss it with someone. If that were at all possible. It had been a long time since Ray had heard from The Horse’s Mouth. Oh, he knew that was entirely down to himself, that even his tiredness militated against reopening conversation in that area. But that did not help. The truth was that he was afraid to try, scared of the possibility that communication was no longer an option. In fact, Ray suspected that he’d blown it somehow. His mind went back to the days when he had been close to God and their conversation had been daily. That was when his faith was young and his enthusiasm still strong. Without understanding of the right way to go about such communication with the divine, he had been so open and uninhibited with his new friend that nothing seemed unworthy of inspection and consideration. Ray understood now that such intensity and pace could not be maintained forever. In time he found that they spoke together less and less until it was only in periods of extreme pressure that he turned to the deity. And hearing became so hard as well. He blamed it all on old age. It was promised that things were different according to one’s age, after all. “Your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions,” he remembered. That seemed appropriate, after all. Old age no longer had the strength and energy to pursue visions. “Yet both dreams and vision concern the future,” said a voice. The words were clear but more written in his mind than spoken. It was familiar in spite of the decades since he had last heard it. This was his chance to ask a few questions. “That’s true, but what sort of future can I have at my age?” He thought the words. “That would be telling,” came the response. “But it’s hard when the future seems empty. It’s like I’ve bought my ticket and now await a train with no idea of its arrival time.” “Same for everyone. You might call it the human condition.” Ray changed tack. “It seems so pointless now. Having no purpose since my abilities are so limited these days.” “Have you no purpose?” “None that I know of.” “You still have the same purpose you’ve always had.” “I do? And what might that be?” “To learn.” Ray thought of his endless explorations of the internet in search of knowledge. That was hardly a purpose. He thought of it more as a way to pass the time. “That’s a hobby,” he said. “I meant something more fulfilling, important.” “Everything is made for a purpose,” replied the voice. “And learning is yours. It seems easy for you because that’s what you’re for. Don’t despise it.” Ray pondered the thought. All the things he’d learned over the last few days passed in array through his memory, unlikely aircraft designs of the second world war, the latest discoveries in the evolution of mankind, the week’s football scores, stuff that would never be more useful to him than interesting nonsense. This was what he was made for? The answer came before he could ask the question. “Yes. Curiosity will have its satisfaction, whether that be bread or caviar. The tool must do what it was designed for.” Ray exclaimed aloud in frustration, “But it seems so pointless!” “You will find no satisfaction in anything else. The tool is only useful when doing what it’s designed for.” There was silence while Ray digested this fact. Then the voice spoke again. “What have you learned today, for instance?” Suddenly Ray knew the answer. “That I have a purpose and I’m doing it.” “Exactly. And now you have fulfilled it. Come, Ray, it’s time to go.” Ray smiled as never before in his long life. Word count: 1,224 For The Bradbury, Week 1, 2025 |
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