A Pair of Angel Hands

As a child, hiding from suffocating strife
She would imagine a pair of angel hands
Cupped around her face
Warm and gentle
Like a summer breeze
There, there, they would whisper
Softly drying her tears.
Ethereal, but tangible.

She could feel arms cocooning her
From the storm raging outside the cupboard door.
Settling the fear, sadness and frustration
In her tiny soul.
Quelling the vengeful spirit
Broiling her insides
As it waited for an opportunity
To tear its way out and wreak havoc

In the embrace of those ghostly arms
Peace and comfort would engulf her
A sense that all would eventually be well
An inner calmness
Would seep into her every atom
Her sob-wrung weary chest would ease
And she could finally lay down to rest
And sleep the sleep of the innocent.

© Kate McClelland 2016



Photo Pixabay

We danced around each other

 

I am heartbroken

But I have no right to be

As you are not mine

We danced around each other

For so long

We danced off in opposite directions

Now the music has paused

And I find that

You are with a different partner

And are dancing away from me for good

I always thought

We would eventually end up together

So that when the dancing stopped

We would be face to face

Together for the final waltz

But I somehow missed a step

Lost my cue

And you did not wait for me

To catch up

So I am now a wall flower

Destined to end the dance alone

Knowing the tune and the steps

But standing like a spare part

A well-dressed mannequin  

Unloved, invisible, bereft   

As the music plays on

 

© Kate McClelland 2015

Moonlight

The moonlight flows over her skin like silver cream.

Illuminating her long, undulating hair.

Sliding across her breasts, arms and thighs

Skin as white as alabaster,

Yet warm to the touch

Soft as down feathers.

Your skin - slightly rough,

Slightly tanned but with a flush of red

As your eyes drink in her features

Like a thirsty traveller.

Revelling in the fluidity of her form

You rise to gently pull her towards you

She, soft and yielding

Leans forwards.

Enveloping you in her hair.

You fall in slow motion

Twisting together like vines

On to the quilted surface

Of a four poster feather bed

Breathing in each other’s scent

And losing yourselves

In the rapture of the moment

Bliss ensues.

© Kate McClelland 2015

Happy New Year

Happy New Year

and

Best Wishes

for

2016

I wish you all you wish yourselves

 

Kate xxx

Hazel Brown

Hazel Brown

Those eyes of Hazel-Brown
With suggestions of Amber,
And flecks of Gold,
When lit up with the light
Of warm recognition and love.
Could melt the coldest heart
And save the darkest soul.
 
© Kate McClelland 2015

Tar Bubbles

Thought I'd try a short story today.
hope you enjoy it. Kate

Tar Bubbles

 

It was a very hot, dry day. It was so hot, that the road tar bubbled and hissed like a slimy black cauldron.

You could smell the acrid odour like a strong ‘whiff’ from the cheap rubber-soles of the people walking along. The soles, gradually melting on the scorching pavement.

You could have boiled mercury on it.

Looking down the street, Tilly could see a blue haze shimmering in a dip in the road, like a pool of smoky water. In this built up inner city area of concrete and bricks – there was no shade to be had at all.

Tilly had been sent out in to this urban desert and told not to come back until ‘tea-time’ by Mum so she could take advantage of the good weather by washing the bed sheets and blankets in the tin bath in the tiny yard at the back of their ‘house’ - as were most of the other women in the street.

The ‘swinging’ ‘60’s it was not. Not here anyway.

Any form of domestic emancipation didn’t arrive in this slum clearance area and for the ‘not so well off’ until much later.

The only thing good about the ‘60’s for most women was the contraceptive pill. Being able to decide NOT to have 11 kids by the time you were forty was the main benefit.

Tilly had tried to help her mum, but being a scrawny six year old, she couldn’t lift the heavy, sopping-wet blankets and tended just to get soaking wet.

She had already been banned from using the clothes mangle after an incident where she had gotten tangled up in the washing as she was pushing it through the mangle and got her hand trapped.

Dad had to dismantle the mangle and then put it back together again – accompanied by a lot of ‘colloquial Anglo-Saxon’ and frustrated shouting and the flinging down of screwdrivers.

This day, Tilly was bored. She sat on the edge of the road kerb, watching the tar bubble up and burst like an evil witch’s brew - when she spied an old ice-lolly stick. With a cry of glee, she grabbed the stick and began to pop the tar bubbles with it.

She stared at the road surface intently. Watching the tar like a Kingfisher, waiting for the bubbles to rise to the surface – a signal to the watching ‘bird’ that a fish was ready to be plucked from the depths.

She was focused totally, oblivious to the traffic (not that there was much traffic where she lived as not many people had cars)

Pop, pop, pop….wait… wait… pop, pop. The smell of the tar rising from the road surface invading her nostrils. The stick getting ever stickier as she popped the tar bubbles to her heart’s content. She had a mission.

After a while, she didn’t know how long - a voice pulled Tilly from her trance.

A cheerful little old lady (not that much taller than Tilly to be honest) had tapped her lightly on the shoulder. She recognised her as one of the neighbours, but couldn’t remember the lady’s name.

She was trying to coax Tilly away from the road, asking her to come in for a cup of tea.

Tilly had been told about ‘strangers’, so very firmly, but politely said ‘No Thank You Missus’ and went back to her self-set task.

The lady went back into her house, but then a few minutes later came out with a piece of cake wrapped in a serviette. Cake!! ‘Wow, now we’re talking!’ Thought Tilly.

She had been warned about ‘strangers’, but not about little old ladies bearing cake.

Tilly got up from the kerb, wiped her sticky hands down her frock and gratefully accepted the offering. The lady told her she was giving her the cake on the understanding that she stopped popping the tar outside the house. 

With a mouthful of cake, she nodded in agreement and the lady went back indoors whilst she woofed the rest of the cake down before anyone could change their minds.

Tilly then moved further down the road and started to pop the tar bubbles again.

Tilly didn’t realise that she was causing the poor old dear anguish and that she had been trying to get her out of the road and out of harm’s way. She had thought the lady just didn’t want her to pop the tar outside her house (she came under the classification of someone who ‘scrubbed the doorstep’ and ‘polished the door brasses’ and had ‘Dolly Doilies’ over the toilet tissue rolls for Tilly).

The lady’s net curtains kept ‘twitching’ (obviously checking Tilly was ok) but she felt like she was being spied on.

After about 5 minutes, the lady came out of her house and walked briskly down the road. Tilly was disappointed there was no more cake on offer.

Then out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her mum hurtling towards her with a face like thunder, wisps of wet blond hair sticking out of the sides of her hastily scraped into place hair bun.

Tilly’s mind raced ahead, trying to give reason to her mum’s demeanour.  ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ but she couldn’t think. She jumped up off the kerb.

Mum rushed up and grabbed the top of Tilly’s arm tightly, her fingernails digging in and dragged her towards home, with Tilly shouting ‘What’s up Mum? What’ve I done? Mum! What’s wrong??’

Frog-marched along the pavement her mum hissing in her ear ‘Shut up! You’re making a show of me – wait til I get you home, you’re for it!’

Tilly was unceremoniously thrown through the front door into the hallway and she fell against the bottom stair, slightly winded.

Mum slammed the front door and screamed in Tilly’s face ‘OH MY GOD!!– The SHAME of it! Embarrassing me like that!!’

‘Like what Mum?’ Still not knowing what she had done and totally confused.

‘You know full well what you did, you little madam!’ – Tilly was totally perplexed - ‘No, I don’t’ – What did I do mum? Tell me!’

It always annoys me the way adults assume that kids know when they have done something they shouldn’t have. How many times did someone say to you when you were a kid ‘You know what you have done – you’re just playing dumb to get out of trouble/trying to denying all knowledge of what you have done / being ‘hard-faced’ or cheeky – when you genuinely did not have a clue what you had done because you were daydreaming and had the memory of an absent-minded goldfish.

‘YOU’ Mum’s accusing finger of fate pointed directly in Tilly’s face – ‘Were playing in the road! Do you know how dangerous that is? Mrs McAleavey was having kittens watching you in case you got run over!’ She paused for breath ‘She was so worried, she came and got me! You took cake from her! How many times have you been told you not to accept things from people? Look at the state of me! I’m in the middle of doing the washing! I’m soaking wet, my hair’s all over the place and I don’t even have my lippy on. I didn’t know where to put myself!!’

(Mum didn’t go outside the door without her hair and make-up done - ever).

‘Get up those stairs to bed and stay there until your Dad gets home! Just wait ‘til I tell him what you’ve done today – you’re going to get a hiding!!’

Tilly ran up the stairs as if the devil himself was after her, ran into the bedroom and slammed the door.

She wracked her boiled brains as to how bad in trouble she was. Then it hit her – in the road - tar bubbles – neighbour – cake – mum – washing – no makeup!!

‘Oh god – I’m in big trouble. Dad is going to kill me – or worse – leave me alive after the belting I’m going to get’. Thought Tilly panicking.

She jumped off the big iron bed and pushed it against the door with all her strength and then jumped back on it. She sat there like a marooned sailor protecting his patch of land.

‘Dad will have to break the door down to get in. Although, I wouldn’t put it passed him, but he might be too tired to hit me after that’ she thought glumly.

Tilly sat on the bed terrified.

The day went from light to dark, then darker still – Mum didn’t come and check on her and no sign of Dad yet, so she got into bed dinner-less and her empty stomach doing summersaults.

She didn’t waste her energy on crying as she knew it would just made her thirsty and tired. She may need all of her strength later.

Then, the front door slammed open and Tilly listened intently as Dad fell sideways through the doorway, sliding along the wall.

He was well drunk! The smell of beer, cigarette smoke and a chip shop supper wafted under her bedroom door. She felt so hungry she nearly opened it.

Nearly – but she wasn’t so hungry that she would chance getting a beating for it.

There was a bit of an altercation between her mum and dad.

‘Where’ve you been? Where did you get the money to get that drunk? Shouted mum. He’d obviously blown his wages again thought Tilly.

Dad roared back ‘I can do what the fuck I want! It’s my money – Do you want some fucking chips or not? Get the kettle on and some bread buttered and shut the fuck up’.

You know – the usual Friday night chitchat.

Mum knew not to argue back as arguing back was like cigarette smoking – it could seriously damage her health – but immediately. Tilly heard her moving around in the kitchen.

She breathed a sigh of relief. It meant Mum was now too mad at Dad to tell him what she had been up to and Dad was too drunk to do anything about it anyway.

By tomorrow, they would have both forgotten and it was an unwritten rule that if she couldn’t be punished on the actual day she had done something, then it was left unpunished.

She didn’t know why this rule was in place, but tonight she was really glad it was.

A wave of calmness came over Tilly as her little body relaxed and most of the visible tension fell away. She got up out of bed and crept to the curtain-less window and perched her elbows on the window ledge.

She traced star patterns cross the sky with her finger. She loved looking at the stars.

They always made her feel safe. She felt that the stars twinkled just for her to say hello and to smile at her and say ‘everything’s okay’. She took great comfort from that.

A clear crescent Moon smiled its lob-sided smile. Tilly smiled back and sighed heavily. She couldn’t move the bed away from the door now as the noise would have brought some unwanted attention.

She made a mental note to herself to move the bed away from the bedroom door early next morning.   

She said good night to the stars, blew them a kiss and got back into bed.

She snuggled under the candy-striped blankets, wrapping them around her like a protective cocoon. Then telling her grumbling stomach to shut up, she gradually fell asleep.

She dreamt of a starry night and the sea. A huge galleon in full sail taking her away across the waves to somewhere quiet, green and full of trees to sit under and not a tar bubble in sight.

 

© Kate McClelland 2015

  

Dusty Bones – The Halloween Version

As it's nearly Halloween, I thought I would try a scary story.

This is actually based on a poem I wrote about a recurring nightmare.
I hope you like it.
It's 1691 words - which, if you turn upside down is - 1691!
Hope you're Halloween is 'spooktacular' (so sorry, I really couldn't resist that one! - I'll get my coat :0))


Dusty Bones – The Halloween Version

 

It’s midnight, on All Hallows Eve and I am already in bed.

It had been a disaster of a Halloween party. Chase had turned up already very drunk and preceded to puke up over the finger buffet and kind of killed the party mood in one fell swoop.

I threw Chase out and Jake offered to take him home to keep him out of trouble. Chase shouting back to me as I slammed the door ‘Sorry Ginny, really sorry. GINNY!‘

The others sloped off to Murphy’s Bar for a ‘lock in’, but I really didn’t feel like going. So I cleared up the mess (swearing under my breath ‘Chase you will pay for this, you jerk’) and went to bed early.

 

The red neon numbers of the digital clock showed -11.59 - then ‘blinked’ and changed to -00.00-.

Sleepily, I registered the change – two pairs if red hollow eyes stare from the black clock face at me for exactly a minute and then they ‘blinked’ to show -00.01-. I rolled over on to my side.

The weather outside had taken a turn for the worst. I could hear the rain batter the windows with its hundreds of tiny fists, demanding entry out of the cold outside.

The wind kicked over the pumpkin lanterns and trashed the plastic bat decorations from around the front door onto the porch floor. It grabbed huge handfuls of the larger icy droplets and lashed them against the sides and roof of the house.

They clattered like tiny bits of gravel or shale thrown against a wooden shack. It growled down the chimney like a disgruntled ex – trying to demand my attention with his ‘listen to me, listen to me’ moans and shrieks!

The wind, angry at being unable to rouse me from my bed, turned on the lonely weeping willow that still stands in the garden at the front of the house, whipping him around and twisting his branches like a pretzel before allowing him to uncoil and return back to his normal hunched state.

The willow threw his wind-beaten arms downwards as if trying to grab the earth to hold himself to the ground. 

I am lying folded up inside the duvet of my bed, like the lemon filling in a meringue. To my sleepy eyes, the shadows of the room billowed and waved like dark muslin voiles in a breeze.

I suddenly realise in my semiconscious state that a dark shape is emerging on my right - someone is leaning over me – looming in the darkness.

 

It flits through my befuddled mind not to be silly - that no-one is here.

I close my eyes and think ‘I’m in my bed cosy and warm. It’s the trick of the shadows and my imagination is running wild because of the date and a few drinks’.

I chuckle and whisper ‘Stupid’ to myself and pull the duvet further up and over my nose.

Again, I feel a presence loom over me again - leaning to stare? No, it feels like it’s studying me.

It has an aloofness about it – a bug collector pinning their new find to the pegboard for the curious to look at.

The light suddenly brightens in the room and I realise I am NOT in my bed.

A thick box-shaped glass case surrounds me on all sides and above me as well. A soft glow ceiling light shines down, straight in my face, as if to highlight my features.

I am still me, I think, curled up in my usual foetal sleeping position – No longer snuggled up in my bed, but lying on a large beanbag cushion, draped in candy-stripe blankets. I also appear to be surrounded by paraphernalia from across the decades of the 20^th Century, like grave offerings.

For some reason, my hair has been pulled into a high ponytail and I appear to be dressed in a pink jogging suit and matching sneakers that I wouldn’t be seen dead in normally!

Seen dead in…

 

I find that I can’t move any part of my body.  My head is resting on the crook of my right arm – my face positioned so it’s looking up through the right hand side of the glass case.

Another figure looms over me again, then fades.

Suddenly, my senses return to me and in my shock and complete creeping, skin crawling horror, I realise that I’m an exhibit in a local museum!

On display like a gassed butterfly or formaldehyde-soaked fish.

Panic takes over my mind, I try again to move, but I can’t, not a single inch.

I try to shout, but I can feel years of dust coating the back of my desiccated throat and not even a death rattle can be raised.

I try to move my fingers, but see that they are withered and the colour of old leather. The tips of the finger bones, finger nails still intact, showing through the shrivelled-back skin.

I want to cry, but there is nothing there, apart from maybe a residue of salt in the tear ducts.

Trapped – my spirit alive and well, but residing in my seemingly very long-dead carcass. The panic rolls into despair and grinding horror. Is this a room in Hell perhaps?

A pile of dusty bones and skin, preserved like beef jerky and dressed as people of the future might think ‘we’ in the ‘past’ dressed.

To be put on display, gawped at and prodded in the name of science from ‘9 to 5’ every weekday except weekends and high holidays.

Another shadowy figure materializes in my short field of vision and finally comes in to focus.

 

She is a beautiful middle aged woman with long, straight silver-grey hair, parted in the middle. A proud, strong face, full of character - of First People decent maybe.

She is wearing a plain straight buckskin coloured dress with a black beaded belt with little flecks of Lapis Lazuli and a black owl pendant hung around her neck, resting on her chest.

She looks me straight in the eyes with such pity and ‘knowing’ as if she can see that I am still here, even in this mummified state.

She is holding a large, hard-backed book which has faded, red leather triangular corners and spine, with a mottled front. It looks like books from centuries ago, but oddly it has no ‘title’ or author’s name anywhere on it.

She opens the book and is trying to show me some of the pages, trying to communicate something to me – a way back perhaps, an escape from this dried meat and fabric prison, a way to release my soul from this entrapment and purgatory.

 

But she is suddenly and unceremoniously shoved aside by a large meat fisted troglodyte and his brood– who really should be under this glass case instead of me.

She tries again to position herself next to me, still holding the book open.

I am using what little there is of my sight to claw any information from the open page as I can, frustratingly, it’s not in a language I can understand but the illustrations look like depictions from the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ I had studied whilst at college.

To my total and utter soul crushing shock, she is moved on by a museum official and advised that her ‘time is up’ and to move along to the next exhibit. She fades away from my sight, her sorrowful face blending back into the darkness out of the reach of my poor vison.

 

The troglodyte takes a quick glance at the flotsam and jetsam in the case with me, not even glancing in my direction and then moves on, shouting for his brood to follow him.

But one of his charges, a young teenage girl, stops to take a closer look at the ‘funny mummy’

 

 She stares into my face – she the ‘observer’, expecting me to be the ‘observed’.

A moment flits by – she frowns in disbelief at what she sees as we stare straight into each other’s eyes.

She sees the observed is now the observer and she stands, silently agog for a moment.

Comprehension dawns across her face - she becomes wide eyed with terror and dreadful surprise.

Backing away from the glass case, she puts one hand over her mouth, the other hand pointing towards me. The rest of the brood crowds around her wondering what the problem is.

Their faces follow to where her outstretched hand is pointing and turn towards me - quickly moving from denial to open mouthed horror of the fact that they can all see two very much alive eyes staring out and looking directly at them from the dried out cadaver in front of them.

I see their ‘about to scream’ faces as they all point towards me ‘AAARRRGGHHH…………

 

 ….GGGHHHH’!!!

And that’s when I found myself sitting bolt upright and shivering in my bed. The meringue duvet in lumpy submission on the bedroom floor. I grab it back and swathe myself in it like a life jacket. My ears catching the last remnant of the scream and with shock I realise - that it’s me screaming.

 

God knows what they saw – For I feel they were real people, and that it wasn’t a dream, but a vision maybe? Or even some sort of ‘time slip’? Did they see a mummified skull screaming back at them, eyes bulging in abject horror?

Or just the skin shredding terror of realising they were being observed by a preserved corpse at a local museum.

Who was the grey lady and what was she trying to tell me?

Is this a glimpse of a possible future for me?

To end up as dusty bones in a glass cabinet, kept in a gloomy annex of some obscure provincial museum.

No ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ for me, but an unnamed relic with just a sticker on the side of the glass box stating:

‘White, Female, Homo Sapien Sapien – 21st Century’

 

A mouldy exhibit, never allowed to finally rest.

Screaming silently again and again….

For all eternity

© Kate McClelland 2015