81 - Scape-bread

One friend taught her to make scape-bread. “Knead it hard for at least ten minutes; I work out all my anger when I’m making bread!”

Another showed her that dough was in want of caresses rather than pummelling. “Fold gently; treat it with respect: it is a living creature.”

So it is that she lives life as an apprentice baker, beating her frustrations into those around her, or nurturing their growth, as the day takes her.

80 - A Quick Game of Drabble ...*

“Hurry up, Mikka!”
Across the space between them appeared ‘Three of the moons were droid-made’.
“Double-phrase for ‘droid-made’, makes 43 klep.”
Sor smiled sweetly as he joined ‘moons’ to ‘Saturn’ with ‘imploded above’.
“Triple-syllable for ‘imploded’: 92.5 to me, sucker!”
Mikka mind-melded with his weapons. You could never be sure an old-time galanaut like Sor had entirely lost the habit of post-victory genocide, and Sor’s ship was itching for a fight.
There was a burst of noise aft.
“Mother ship beacon,” sang Mikka. “Call it a draw.”
Before Sor could answer him, the retreating picket’s neutron-drive scattered the phrases.

* I don't know if sci-fi writers invented flash-fiction, but a 'drabble' is an SF story no more than 100 words long.

79 - The Cock-a-Leekie Ebbs

The cock-a-leekie ebbs from the right of the bowl, and I read in its jetsam a turn to the north. It is part way through the Wellington that I realize that though the meal is just right the train itself is quite wrong. I have until the dessert course to re-think my holiday, and until breakfast to make contact with my luggage, checked-in to the van. I’ve made worse mistakes, I decide, and order a liqueur.

78 - Car Boot

Several early bird car-booters bagged bargains such as a packaged GPS for £20 and a pair of travel rugs for a fiver. The best deal had to be the alloys and slightly muddy tyres for a ton, but the Spear & Jackson stainless steel fork and spade were okay for a tenner. The boots, the overalls, and the box of disposable gloves were £10 the lot, after which pretty well all the forensic evidence was gone.

77 - Elizabeth David and Me

Early one Winter solstice I settled into the top deck of the X5 with Jack Kerouac as my companion and serenaded by kids from St Johns heading for their breakfast club. Down at street level, I saw the handwritten sign: trainee baker wanted – enquire within.

Sal, Dean and Marylou sat quietly in the ’49 Hudson waiting for me to get on board with them. Eddie was starving, but wasn’t he always?

I wondered.

The tall mist–enveloped beeches of the West Woods leaned towards the bus, the rising sun silhouetting us against their boughs. I’d criss-crossed the downs for over a year now, burning in the unremitting summer and freezing in snow-bound traffic. Was all this an escape?

The college catering course had left its indelible inedible stain on shelves of library books. There were five cracked copies in the same paperback edition of English Bread and Yeast Cookery, and there and then I fell in love with the woman who sold out enough to have her own cookery range, but not to the extent that she’d sell garlic presses.

We bicker now and then, Elizabeth David and me. She uses far too much salt, I complain, but maybe I just sold out more than she did in the matter of taste. And I can’t remember on which Midwest sidewalk I left Sal, Dean and Marylou, but Eddie and his kin visit me often. There is always someone hanging around the rubbish skip in the car park behind the bakery.

Some of my best bread goes there.

76 - After Dark

Night fell in the hydroponics lab as if ‘at the flick of a switch’, though only a few of my great-grandparents recalled seeing such a device. The texture of the silence mutated from livestock and distant traffic to wildlife and love-murmuring. There was the staccato snap of a twig broken underfoot, and my hearts skipped a beat. This was a simulation: where in hell did a twig come from, and who or what trod on it?

75 - Games People Play

Tony looked up, a frown of curiosity crossing his features as he wondered what Martin was up to. He heard what sounded like a clockwork boat; surely not? Then he saw the boat, but not clockwork at all: a little steam toy that Martin had bought at a festival some years before. A fully grown man, in his second childhood evidently, playing with a boat in the bathroom sink of all places!

Martin changed the unspoken subject.

“Could you do me a favour? Would you take the egg boxes back to Sandy?"

“Er, okay."

Tony picked up the cartons and turned to the door. He paused awhile, and looking back added: “You alright?"

“Yes: why?"

“Oh, no reason."

Closing the door behind him, Tony raised his eyebrows and breathed out. Dad was being dad, he supposed, but still ….

Back at the washbasin, Martin drained the water and cursed the noisy little toy. He wasn't playing, he was just … okay he was playing, but only to see whether the boat actually worked. In the 10 years since he had bought it on a whim, he'd never even tried it out.

“Well," he mused, “at least now I’ve something to write about.”

Egg boxes delivered, and greetings exchanged with his friend’s mum, Tony ran upstairs to resume the previous day’s game.

“You okay?”

“Good, yeh: you?”

“Yeh. Zombie Revenge?”

“Nah: World of Fury?”

“Okay. Does your dad ever do strange things?”

“He’s an oldie: everything he does is strange.”

“Yeh, but does he play with toys?”

“No! Does yours?”

“Looked like it just now: weird. First to score 300?”

Martin sat down to type. He still hadn’t settled on a plot, and he didn’t want to turn out a stream-of-consciousness ‘literary’ novel, but he had the bones of a character. ‘Edward’ would be playful, enquiring of mind, handsome – of course. Artistic license, it was called.