n3ta

A Cast Of Characters (from a story not yet written)

https://accumulationofthings.com/things ... haracters/

(There are 60 images in this thing so the rest are at the end of that link)

There's also 99 footnotes, for absolutely no discernible reason

You can read them if you like

But you don't have to

This story cast list is marvellous!

I liek the notes, too.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed a cast list befo!

hooray. thank you homfrus

The Poetry Competition

https://accumulationofthings.com/things ... mpetition/

(featuring Claire, Ethel, Tina and Daniel, if you wish to cross reference your media)

Three Short Tales About Antoine

https://accumulationofthings.com/things ... t-antoine/

(featuring Agnes, Antoine, the cave, the mermaid, some previously unmentioned crabs)

I was going to wait until I had enough of these stories in my notebook for an anthology but already I have run out of things to say

These are lovely, Squire! Huzzah!

There's only one slight thang - a spelling mistake, p'raps?

"He sat beside the fie in his cave" (From Inside The Cave)

cheers. i have corrected it

The New Boy

https://accumulationofthings.com/things ... e-new-boy/

Oi loikes!

Excellent, thank you

Tales From The Town #4: The Classification Of Animals



Of all the dreams Yulia dreamed, her favourite dreams were dreams of animals.

Today, around noon, as she served a customer some cigarettes from the display behind the till, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, on the street outside the shop, a turtle. And on the turtle’s back she could see a tortoise. And on the tortoise’s back she could see a terrapin. And on the terrapin’s back she could see a fourth creature that was exactly the same as the first three creatures, except this one was even smaller again than all the others below.

She didn’t know what this one was called, but she was certain its name started with a T. It had to. Yet no matter how many names she tried – tartaran? tiralpoise? tintle? turlesque? – none of them seemed to fit.

She was so distracted by all this she was late for lunch.

***
A week from now, when Yulia tells Jeanette all about it in the cafe, she will no longer remember whether it was all a dream or a sight she had actually seen. Not that it matters. That’s not the point of the story now.

The point of the story now is whether on the back of the fourth creature there had been a fifth, too small for her to see, but there all the same. And on the back of the fifth, perhaps a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, a ninth… For all of them now Yulia searches for a name.

Jeanette eats her cake in silence and smiles wider with every bite.

These are now on some saturday morning releaese schedule for some reason

so this is a sneak preview

because i'm too impatient to wait for releases schedules

Tales From The Town #5: There Is No Such Thing As Ghosts



They were hiding in the long grass in the hollow, watching the world go by. They could see out but no one could see in. Not even the dogs.

“Hana told Mum that Oya went to the ruins and Anna was there reading a book and there was a ghost there watching her and Anna wasn’t even scared a all,” Ethel said.

“There is no such thing as ghosts,” Claire said.

“There is,” Ethel insisted.

“There isn’t,” Claire said.

“What about Lucas?” Ethel said.

“He’s not a ghost,” Claire said. “He’s a reflection.”

“From the past!”

“He’s still not a ghost.”

“What about Lucy?” Tina asked.

“She’s not a ghost either,” Claire said. “She’s a memory.”

“But that’s what a ghost is!” Tina said. “A memory of yourself that never fades away.”

“But Lucy’s not her memory. She’s ours,” Claire said. “We’re not allowed to forget her.”

“She still sounds like a ghost to me,” Tina said.

“She’s not a ghost at all!”

“What about David?” Daniel asked, pointing to lonely figure moving glacially along the horizon line. His beard followed along behind him like a trail of smoke.

“He’s not a ghost. He’s a ghoul.”

Tales From The Town #6: On The Beach



Down on the beach, under the light of the tainted moon, the waves broke backwards while the fish flew around like birds. Anemones blood in their billions like roses in the dark. And out of the sea the crabs swarmed together, dancing in patterns resembling the face of some shifting shapeless beast.

It was the night of the crabbus, and any soul who looked upon its form would be condemned toa lifetime of madness and despair.

Antoine watched on from the shadows of his cave. He shivered but did not look away. There is more in this world than any of us should ever know.

Hooray x 3!

thank you!

Tales From The Town #7: The Most Disgusting Thing In The World



“The most disgusting thing in the world,” Claire said confidently. “Is swimming in the sea and a great big jellyfish comes along and it goes over your head like a plastic bag!”

“The most disgusting thing in the world,” Tina said. “Is having your eyeballs pulled out and turned round and pushed back in again so you can see your own brain!”

“The most disgusting thing in the world,” Ethel said. “Is waking up and finding maggots in your bed and you’ve been sleeping in your bed all night and you’re a maggot too and you’re made of maggots and you don’t even know you are a maggot you just think you’re normal but you’re not you’re a maggot!”

The most disgusting thing in the world,” Daniel said. “Is bananas.”

“‘Are’ bananas,” Ethel told her brother.

“Or ‘is’ banana,” suggested Claire.

“Is ‘a’ banana,” Tina said.

“Anyway,” said Claire, looking at both Tina and Daniel with a glare so intense it knocked over the ketchup. “Bananas aren’t disgusting at all.”

“They are,” Daniel said with a shudder, as he thought about bananas for a second too long. “They’re horrible.”

“They can’t be that disgusting,” Ethel said. “Mum eats bananas sandwiches.”

“I eat banana sandwiches,” Claire said.

“They’re still disgusting,” said Daniel. “They make me feel sick.”

“They don’t make me feel sick,” Claire said. “And even if they did, they wouldn’t be disgusting as sick!”

“Or maggots.”

“Or sick with maggots in it!”

“What about a banana with maggots in it?” Daniel asked. “And the maggots are being sick in the banana?”

“And the banana’s in a sandwich!”

“And mum’s eating the sandwich!”

“And I’m eating the sandwich!”

“And then someone shoves the sandwich right through your eye and into your brain!”

“And then your brain EXPLODES!”

“And then some pigeons come along and start eating your brains!”

“And then the pigeons explode!”

“And then we have to eat the pigeons!”

“And then we explode!”

“And then we have to eat ourselves!”

“And then we explode AGAIN!”

Hooray

Thank you. Also I cannot be stopped

Tales From The Town #8: David



He was unemployed.

He had been unemployed for some time.

He had been unemployed for so long it felt like he had always been unemployed, although of course he hadn’t. There were a couple of years of work in there, and some college, and school, and those years when you’re too young to go to school, and before that the womb.

He was unemployed and that’s all you need to know about him.

All resembalnces into people living and or dead and definitely overweight are coincidental in nature

also its okay i've stopped now

To paraphrase the chorus lyric of that Shamens song that got to #1

#These are good, these are good.#
#They're very beezer, good#


Also: Tales From The Town #8: David

You'll be hearing from my lawyers!

a universal david description

I was on a *cough* training course *cough* once, and there were four Davids on it, out of approximately 30 ne'er do wells.

Davids G, H, P, and T

Tales From The Town #9: The Doll’s Room



“Mum! Mum! We found a new room!”

“Another one?”

“Yep!”

“It’s the second one this week!”

“This room was full of dolls!”

“They’re so creepy.”

“They all look at you!”

“And keep looking at you!”

“The whole time you’re in there!”

“And then you can hear them laughing when you leave!”

“One of them winked at me,” Daniel said. “And then her eye fell out!”

“Well, I always wondered where they all came from,” Agnes said. “You must have found their nest.”

“It’s behind Ethel’s bedroom!”

“You have to crawl through a little tunnel to get there.”

“There’s a door in my cupboard,” Ethel said. “That’s how you get in to see them.”

“And how they get out to see us!”

“There never used to be a door there,” Agnes said. “I’d have noticed.”

“We know, Mum.”

“We already told you this is a new room.”

“Well, don’t tell Oya and Anna,” Agnes said. “They might not want to know they live in a house that grows. It might frighten them.”

“Anna’s not scared of anything!” Ethel said.

“Well, Oya might be,” said Agnes. “You did say these dolls were frightening, remember?”

“We did not,” said Claire. “We said they were creepy!”

“They make you all shivery just to look at them,” Tina said.

“But they’re not scary at all,” Ethel said.

“Not even when they wink at you!” Daniel told his mother.

“And their eyes fall out!”

“And they start bleeding doll’s brains out of their eyeholes!”

“I really don’t think you should tell Oya,” Agnes said firmly.

exclamation mark overload

i wish i could grow a new room

yes

even if it was full of dolls

i'd take it

Tales From The Town #10: The Speed Of Dreams



Daytime

Yulia didn’t count how many dreams she had in any particularly day. If she did, she would have discovered that today, for example, between the hours of 8am and 5.30pm, not including an hour for lunch (1pm-2pm) and two breaks for tea (10.15am-10.30am; 3.45pm-4pm), she had 23 distinct dreams, plus 3 subdreams, one of which also contained a single subsubdream, for a total of 27 dreams, occurring at a rate 3.375 dreams per hour.

That was the speed at which the day passed her by.

Nightshift

Yulia’s nights were somewhat slowe. Yesterday evening, for example, between the hours of 11pm and 6.30am, not including two toilet breaks (2.13am-2.17am; 3.49am-3.57am), an hour of acute anxiety (11.01pm-12.01am) and a short period of moongazing (12.02am-12.45am), she had only one dream, albeit experienced across three distinct (but linked) periods of sleep (12.46am-2.12am; 2.18am-3.49am; 3.58am-6.30am), at a rate of 0.18237082066 or 0.547112462 dreams per hour, depending on how exactly you wanted to count them.

In this dream, she dreamt of the shop, and everyone in it, in a detail so exact and complete it could have come direct from the shop’s CCTV. In some ways, the only difference between Yulia’s nights and days was that at night she no longer had her dreams to distract her from the monotony of the day.

Tales From The Town #11: The First Ice Cream Van Of The Summer



Agnes was in the kitchen when she heard the music in the distance. A chill ran down her spine. She closed the laptop and waited for what was sure to come.

***

Footsteps on the stairs. Doors flung wide. A swarming crowd of desperate faces, raised from some winter-long hibernation.

***

“Mum! Mum! Can we have some money?”

“For ice creams!”

“From the ice cream van!”

“We’ve got a freezer full of ice creams,” Agnes said. “Can’t you have one of those?”

“But they’re not the same!”

“They’re exactly the same,” Agnes said.

“They’re not.”

“The ice cream van has more.”

“And they’re bigger!”

“And colder!”

“They are not colder.”

“They are!”

“And they might have some new ones!”

“Last year they had some we’d never seen before!”

“They were horrible!”

“Well, our ones aren’t horrible,” Agnes said. “I got the ones we all like.”

“But we’ve been good, Mum!”

“Really good!”

“You said if we’d been good we could have an ice cream!”

“From the ice cream van!”

“I don’t remember saying that at all.”

“Well, you did!”

“You definitely did!”

“Okay, okay,” Agnes said, fishing out some small change from the pockets of her jeans and dropping it into their grasping mitts. “But don’t just buy the ones we’ve got in the freezer!”

***

Footsteps in the hall. Doors slamming shut behind them. Cries of excitement fading out down the street.

***

Agnes sat down at the table and sighed. Of all the things in all the worlds, the continued existence of ice cream vans was the thing she understood the least.

with thanks to arab strap for the title

Tales From The Town #12: The Sky At Night



“What’s that one?” Selene asked, pointing at the brightest object in the night sky.

“Which one?” Patricia said.

“The one I’m pointing at! The brightest one.”

“Oh, that’s the moon.”

“It is not the moon,” Selene said. “I think I know which one the moon is. I lived there long enough.”

“It is the moon,” Patricia said. “It’s definitely the moon.”

“If that’s the moon,” Selene said. “Then what’s that?”

Patricia screamed.

Tales From The Town #13: An Alphabet Of Absences



A

They decided to write this story without specific letters.

B

So each sentence would have a different one missing (in order).

C

It was harder than it looked at first.

D


Especially without cheating.

E

But Tina had a plan.

F

So what they did was write each sentence out however they liked.

G

And then they would use the thesaurus to find alternatives to any words that didn’t fit.

H

Claire said it still sounded like deviousness.

I

Ethel expressed an opposed theory.

J

While Daniel didn’t even know how the thesaurus worked.

K

So he just inspected up words in the dictionary that he loved the sound of.

L

His favourite was ‘phantasm’.

M

Or perhaps ‘pennyweight’.

N

‘Periwig’ was also a good word.

O

He didn’t get passed P.

P

Claire wanted to know what the book was actually going to be about.

Q

Tina said that it didn’t have to be about anything.

R

Except itself.

S

Claire pronounced that that verbalized like a load of old garbage.

T

Which was probably verifiable.

U

“We deserved to have chosen something simpler,” Ethel said.

V

“Like an acrostic!”

W

“Acrostics are the most terrible of all things!” Claire said.

X

By now Daniel was playing on his glockenspiel.

Y

And Tina had gone off sailing on her large boat that is used for the most part for pleasure cruising.

Z

So Claire an Ethel abandoned the story and went outside to feed the hippotigris.

to celebrate our lipogram chat from earlier

also that's the end of my notebook

i'll have to find another one now

good man, work

Tales From The Town #14: The Little Drummer Girl



The little drummer girl walked barefoot through the woods, her hair fluttering in the breeze like the flag of a forgotten kingdom. She had walked these lands since the civil war. She would walk them till the next. A trail of blood, a trail of bones. This country of ours is an endless grave. Only the beat of her drum keeps the dead asleep.

“She’s definitely a ghost,” Ethel said, as she peered out from behind the tree to a get a better look.

“She’s not a ghost,” said Claire. “She’s a musician.”

(based on this i suppose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD1uJtTdpik )

Tales From The Town #15: Summer



A Summer’s Day

“It’s hot,” Tina said.

“It’s really hot,” Claire agreed.

“It’s too hot,” Ethel insisted.

“It’s not hot enough,” said Daniel.

A Summer’s Night

It was dark out there. You couldn’t see a thing. But you could hear it all. It went on and on. It would not stop. Don’t they ever sleep out there?