Echoes
Laura Dockrill
For my family…
I love you. xxx
These stories are not all from my imagination; some have been retold and passed down from others and so…
With love and thanks to the following:
19:16. A special thank you to Daniel for this East London urban legend and for being an inspiration to me always.
Hibiki Jikiniki is for my friend and fellow poet, Tim Clare. Thank you for your time and exciting, revolting mind.
The Tongue Cut Sparrow A special thank you to my mother for the story and for your friendship…thanks for pretending not to notice when I steal your food.
That Shrewd Little Fox is for my especially talented friend and loyal editor Clare Hey, we’ve had lots of fun together creating these stories. Without you I would be in an awful pickle.
The Boy Who Cried Monster Thank you for the story, Ryan.
Table of Contents
Skin It Helps to Keep Your Insides in, Woah, My Skin, So Glad You Were Invented…)
Isabella MocZareles Jezeballa Bumpington-Brown
May, Fay and Rosemary or Three Sisters and a Sledgehammer
Oh, You’ll Never Get to Heaven….
BORED
Off an oily main road, where not even the pigeons could be bothered to visit, was an ugly mechanical building. The building was so violently ugly that visitors were advised to bring sunglasses to shield their eyes from the hideous view. Most of the building had been deserted, odd bits of furniture lay everywhere, haunting empty office spaces, broken technical equipment, all under a blanket of dust and old skin cells as though it were the residue of a ship under the sea. Forgotten.
But at the very top of the building was an office full of professional scapegoats. Inside, the cold walls were colourless, covered with empty corkboards and organized post-it notes. Everything was stiff and dated and static, so painfully unforgiving it forced you to wander through it as though you were colour-blind. It was as though somebody had ordered everything to be painted grey.
And the eight people who worked in this office were dry and flaky–not in a tasty almond croissant way, but in a sore skin sort of way. And these people were pessimistic. They believed that the world was crumbling in; they believed everything was a conspiracy against them, gruelling, grumbling, and continuing, even though every day consisted of boredom and dullness and paranoia. And this wiry stiff party (bad choice of word) wouldn’t communicate–they wouldn’t know how to, they never played the radio or treated themselves, they just sat and stared and tapped away like robots. All except for one.
Albert started off at Limps as a work experience, forced by his parents to do something, anything, other than write his silly stories. And three years later he was still there, filing, plonking out letters, photocopying, but always, in his head, writing stories. His father said he should read more than write, he said before you even pick up a pen you have to know the history behind what you are writing about. He said, ‘You can’t have a tree without roots.’ But Albert believed that history was created every day and roots were growing all the time, it was just a matter of where you planted the seeds.
Albert liked writing about what he already knew. He liked to write about what he saw and what he felt. He liked to write at about six o’clock when the sky was so pink and perfect he could almost see Marc Bolan rising out of it. He liked to write about the cute girl he saw on the train that day who had odd shoes on and had