Guardians (short story inspired by Don Miskel's photo)

I can be patient and calm. I can wait for him to grow and mature into a decent sensible adult. I can impart on him my pearls of wisdom, and hope that a fragment of what I am saying sinks in and makes a change. I can inspire and build hope and optimism. I can ensure that his life is full of fun and meaningful encounters that will shape the person that he is to become. I will give him adventure and fill his world with wonderful moments that will last forever. I will also show him fear, make him scared, angry. He needs this as much as he needs the good stuff. After all, there would be no good in the world if there was no evil to counter balance it.

My role, as Guardian, has always been to shape the future. There are some of us who are better than others, but our goal is to shape the bigger picture. Not the individual. To mould the future of the whole planet.

They know the future, they have seen it. They have pre-programmed us with our instructions. We don’t have a list of guidelines to follow. There are no company policies and procedures that point us in the right direction. Ours is just to hope that the pre-programming is good enough to see us through. We are left to our own devices to find our way and reach the goal through trial and error.

I know I have a limited amount of time to instil all that is expected of me. A limited time for this most important of all jobs. After that as my Ward gains independence, my role as Guardian will become redundant, and my ability to shape the future is no longer applicable. After that, my Ward will have to stand on his own two feet and find his own inspiration. It is a very large responsibility that we have.

They have programmed us to take the moments of anger and frustration, and to ride the tide until such moments are calm again. From this, lessons are to be learnt. My Ward must maintain a measure of control, but must also learn the hard lesson of defeat, and learn to take it graciously. His is to a life of wonder and new dreams. His is to be a life filled with love.

I watch my Ward every moment I have. I hope I have given him the tools he needs to shape his future. I worry that what I have done is enough. Although I am, as Guardian, in the body of a child, my limited time will be time well spent. 

FOUR STAGES (a short story inspired by Julian Sewell's photo)

So it started as revenge. He’d lied, cheated, and even worse than both of those, persuaded our friends to cover for him. I mean, did he really think I wouldn’t find out? How naive did he think I was? I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve experienced enough in my life to know when people are lying. It’s in the eyes. The eyes will always give you away.

Besides, in order to be a good liar, you have to remember what you’ve said. It’s all well and good starting off with a little fib, but little white lies will always lead to massive big whoppers. In order to maintain the fabrication, you have to remember each and every single thing you’ve said. Not easy for a person who’s IQ is double digit challenged.

Breaking up is like going in to mourning. It has stages. Denial, Depression, Anger, Acceptance. If any psychologists out there are telling me I’ve missed out a stage, or added one, I don’t care. My past tells me that I cope with mourning in those four stages. This whole situation with him, however, has hit a small snag. I’m struggling to get past Anger. Really struggling. Like, REALLY struggling.

The Denial stage was over very quickly. I found out about his cheating ways, said to myself, “No! He’d never cheat on me! He loves me!” Then I saw the evidence. I’d heard the rumours, followed him, saw him pick her up in his fancy BMW, then saw them make out in the car while it was still parked on the curb outside her parents’ house. Did I mention that she was so young she was still living at home? He’s 37. I don’t think she’s out of her teens yet. Could be younger. Teenage girls always look mature for their age. She was pretty, but the makeup was too thick, the skirt too short and the hair backcombed far too much. If the heels were higher, she’d make good money on a street corner somewhere.

Hello!

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Kari xx

www.karimilburn.com

Friends (a short story inspired by Beth Marshall's photo)

"This is the kind of place that they build houses on without removing the bones." Harold said. "They wouldn't care about the history. The stories. They wouldn't even care if any ancestors had any complaint." 

Frank laughed,  "You don't have any ancestors."

"I could have! I had plenty of fun back in the war days. Different gal in every town, I had."

"No you didn't. And whores don't count!"

Harold frowned, "I was a handsome fellow back then, you know. All the ladies said so. I didn't need to pay."

"Fellow? You were never a fellow! And if the women were in a bar and you bought them a drink, you paid."

Harold lent back against the cold of the gravestone, a piece of grass bobbing up and down as he chewed one end. The view here was beautiful. The green fields of Ohio spread out before him, forests of oak and hickory behind. "This here graveyard ain't a bad spot to be buried. It's peaceful here."

Frank jumped down off another gravestone and patted the dust off his backside. "It's too damn quiet here. Nothing happens."

"That's the whole point. A nice peaceful place to see out eternity."

"Eternity is a damned long time. All kinds of stuff could happen here in eternity. They might build a new city, or something."

Harold rubbed the growth on his chin and spat out the grass. "Eve would have liked it here. She'd have wanted a farm with some chickens. The woman had a thing about keeping chickens."

"Eve died a very long time ago, Harold." Frank was sympathetic, but always a realist.

"I know she did."

Leaving The Man Behind (short story)

I grew up before the invention of the internet. When making a phone call meant walking to the end of the street to use the phone box. When the biggest craze was the yo-yo and we all had bicycles. We had one rule to abide by; get home before it gets dark. We didn't spend hours on the x-box or PlayStation. Instead, we built swings in trees and raced our bikes through the woods.

My best friend was James Davies. Jimmy to me and the rest of the kids in school. We lived on opposite ends of the same street - he lived the posh end, close to the park. I lived the other end, closer to the school and store. His Dad was a Captain in the RAF. Mine was a steel worker in the factory. His Mum wore Chanel lipstick. I once caught my mum carefully rubbing a pickled beetroot on her lips.

We were chalk and cheese, but we were also joined at the hip. Summer break meant weeks of adventure time; hunting rabbits with air riffles, chasing sheep in the fields, building tree houses. We read comics and The Secret Seven, dreamed of changing the world and inventing something spectacular. We wondered over Apollo and even built our own space ship out of cardboard boxes and tin foil. 

Jimmy's Mum and Dad put up with me, but I knew that I was not the kind of friend that they wanted their precious James to have. They were proper middle class, I wasn't. Jimmy should have been in a boarding school somewhere, but he said that as long as his father’s invalid parents lived in the retirement home, they couldn't afford to send him away. The only time I ever saw the serious side to Jimmy was when he talked about how scared he was of his grandparents dying. As soon as they did that, he'd be sent away.

When we were nine, I saw the marks on Jimmy's back where his father’s belt had been. Jimmy said that he'd deserved it, and that it hadn't really hurt, but I could tell he was lying. Captain Davies had been in the Second World War and said that as a fighter pilot, he'd dropped hundreds of bombs on the Germans. But Jimmy told me that he'd heard him talking to his Mum one evening, and that he was actually a supply pilot, and had only ever flown around the country delivering stuff to the troops. But regardless of that, Jimmy feared his father. When he heard the boom of his voice down the street, he’d drop whatever we was doing and run as fast as he could to get home.

As carefree as Jimmy appeared, he still obeyed his father’s every word.

It was the summer of '72 and we were twelve years old. It had taken a hell of a lot of work, but we'd managed to persuade our parents to let us go camping overnight in the fields just a few miles from home. 

Jimmy had a two man tent. Nothing special, and smaller than our outhouse, but for two intrepid explorers, it was our mansion. My mother had packed us some food. A lot of food. Tinned pork sandwiches, apples and banana’s, 4 bottles of pop, and even a pack of ginger snaps. Jimmy’s mother had also supplied us with 2 water canteens and even more sandwiches. Jam sandwiches, as it turned out. Perfect fuel.

We set up camp on the edge of the field, on a rise. From under the leaves of the huge tree, we could see all of the land stretch away before us. The sheep and cows, the road cutting the landscape in two with a dark grey slash of tarmac. We were kings of our land.

We built our tent, and stored our food and blankets inside so the pretend wolves wouldn’t get to it. We then proceeded to have a great battle, with thousands of pretend troops fighting for their freedom and their lands. Jimmy won.

BEING FUNNY FOR MONEY!

Nature (short story inspired by Ed Elliott Sculpture)

The first time I saw them, I was six. My family lived in a village called London. A small place where hundreds of years ago, millions lived. It was hard to believe the pictures that I had seen. Hard to believe that our small timber house was built on the remains of a great city. But the city was long gone, buried under tonnes of rubble and rotting moss. The trees and wildlife had come back to this place, and very little survived of what once was.

They came out of the forest. Slow, peaceful, calm. They came from the very wood that we burnt for warmth. But they moved, and flowed, and had a beauty about them that was mesmerising. The ground seemed to ripple below them, propelling them forward with hardly a sound. Their faces were smooth and expressionless, their eyes dark pools that followed our every move.

They were our judges. And it was judgement time.

It had started so slowly, but we noticed it. Warming summers, vicious winters, the polar ice caps melting, volcanoes exploding, rivers flooding. The experts had called it Global Warming. The planet was changing, and as its inhabitants, we blamed ourselves and tried in our own feeble way to amend what we thought we had done wrong.

LEGACY (a short story)

This will be my final farewell. I know that I am dying. I've been trapped in this prison for almost eight hours and I can feel my insides cooking. The sun is intense and it's sucking up my energy like a sponge. I've tried to escape for so long now that my legs just don't have in them to keep trying.

And so these words will be my legacy to you, my captors. I will make a promise to you. My descendants will out live you all. They will see to it that when your time is up - they will be the victors.

My children will infest your life, and you will call them pests. They will do what has been programmed in their DNA. They will clean up your messes, will scavenge on your waste, and will do so in order to secure their survival.

We have been on this planet for over 300 million years. And we evolved into something that you fear. We are strong enough to out last you. We are better suited to this world and its terrain. And when you are dead and rotting, we will feed from you, and our sisters will lay eggs in you and you will sustain us for years to come as we feed from your rotting corpses.

As always, we will clean up after you. We will clean you up.

We do not need to farm, to build and to develop to survive. We are a plague, and we will devour your remains and your cities and continue on, long after you have gone.

Though I know that the end of my time is soon, I will die knowing that I have fathered hundreds of children. And they will carry my genes.

It was the coffee that attracted me to my prison. The smell of the damp rotting beans was too much to ignore. I climbed the wall and dropped into my hell, so full of heavenly waste. I have eaten my last meal, and now I will wait for the sun to finish my life for good. These glass walls are too slippy for me to climb, though I have tried.

And I am not alone. There are twelve of us in here, not quite enough for us to climb on each other so a few can survive. Which one of us will die first is the only question left. The sun acts like a laser, burning its light into our prison, scorching us one by one.

We have adapted to your selfish ways. There are other species that have suffered by your hands. Those species have been slaughtered, hunted and pushed away from their natural habitats. And you had no regard for them. But we have relished your endeavours. You feed us, though try to exterminate us. You shelter us though you hate our being near. You keep us warm though you would rather see us dead. You are a contradiction, and though many of us have died by your hand, we persevere. You will not make us extinct as you have others. We are too many and too strong.

And soon, you will destroy yourselves and we will laugh at your demise. We will multiply in your absence and recover the world that you have tried to destroy.We are made of stronger stuff. Step on us and our children may still survive. You study us, you have learnt to understand us, but we cannot help you with your self-destructive ways. You do not need any help with your self-destructive ways.

There is a female in our prison and she carries her young. She knows that her time is up too, and buries the eggs deep into the coffee. No doubt you will empty our remains into your sewers where you think the problem will be gone from you forever. But her eggs may still hatch, down there in the darkness and warmth. You will have flushed away what you think is your problem, but you will ensure that our descendants will be born.

We were created to withstand the destruction of humans. And we will go on. We are part of the food chain. We eat the decomposing bodies and vegetation, and are food for birds and lizards.We are too important to perish by your hands.
You, however, are not.

Perspective

I'd like to have small chat about perspective. My issue is that very few people these days seem to have any.
I want.
I need.
There is a massive difference to the above two sentences. MASSIVE.
I want... an iPad, an exercise bike, a smart TV, a new kettle, that gorgeous top, those stunning shoes...
I need... water, food in my belly, a roof over my head.
It's really not rocket science.

That child in the supermarket queue screaming at mum that he needs some sweets? He doesn't need them at all. He wants them, is all.

I get so tired of people who overreact and think it's the end of the world when the heel comes off their shoe, or they've run out of petrol, or they've burnt dinner, or have been dumped, or, heaven forbid, can't find something to wear in a wardrobe full of clothes!
So let me clarify... The end of the world will come in several million years when the sun bakes the earth to a dry crisp. Or sooner if a monster asteroid hurtles through space toward us and Bruce Willis isn't available to drill a hole in it.
In the meantime, man up. And shut up.

These are tough times. People all around us are losing their jobs. Then potentially their homes. Then potentially their life savings (not sure what they are...). It's not easy. But you know what, we'll survive. It's a primal human instinct. It's in our DNA. It's in our power.
We survived smallpox, the plague, polio. We survived 2 world wars and countless others. Hell, we have even survived evolution and natural selection. We're a hell of a lot tougher than we give ourselves credit for.
Today, I learnt that two people have been cured of HIV aids. They no longer have the disease. How amazing is this? WE DID THIS!

So the next time you overreact when you spill red wine on your favourite white blouse, do it away from me, please. Because you'll get no sympathy from me. There are far more desperate souls out there that require my love and my time than you.

My Dad died of cancer a few years ago. I remember asking him one day, when the pain was too much for him, if he wanted anything. "No." he said quietly, "I don't want anything. I'm ok." He obviously wasn't. So I asked again. Did he need anything? He replied, "Need? Yes. I need a cure for cancer."

That is perspective.

Temple of Lies (a short story inspired by Sahra Pitt's photo)

The body lay at the bottom of the stairs. Right leg bent at an impossible angle, arms outstretched in a comic 'I surrender' salute. His neck was broken, his lips and nose touching the carpet in a caress.
Detective John Howdon looked around the foyer of the Clarrindale Hotel, taking in the surroundings. The uniforms had closed the doors and corralled all of the guests and staff into the ball room. He could hear the soft murmur of their voices carrying across the marble halls. The CCTV only covered the bottom seven steps and had captured the end of the fall. One dead. Forty five suspects. This was going to be a long night.
The body was Francis Temple, entrepreneur, multimillionaire, ex party boy before marrying the beautiful Sally Corby. John had seen his face plastered across the covers of magazines and newspapers for nearly six years. The kid was rich, ruthless and, if the tabloids were to be believed, randy. Thirty two years old.
So, accident or murder?
Kneeling down close to the body, John pulled out latex gloves and pushed his hands in to them although he inspected the body without touching it. Forensics were on their way for that.

The suit was a Hugo Boss tuxedo, white shirt, white bow tie. And a proper bow tie. No clip on for this man. There was a slight tear to the knee of the broken leg. Rough edges, not cut clean. John re-positioned himself to take a closer look. A little blood. A scratch to the broken leg, like a carpet burn. No protruding bones. 

Highly polished Loakes dress shoes, never worn outside by the look of the wear on the soles. No scuffing on them at all.
He had fallen, or been pushed, from the top of the stairway?
A bellboy stood at the doors of the ball room next to a uniform who was taking notes. John called him over. "Name?"

"Terry Black, sir."
"Did you see what happened?"
"I was at the reception desk so I only saw him fall the last few steps."
John nodded. And waited.
"He came down really quickly."
John nodded again.
"Fast, like he'd been pushed or something."