Severed head

His head was severed from his body and he felt the agony of that, but he was still alive. His head rolled down the enlarged gullet of the Mummy-thing. Its throat was lined with a sticky red shiny liquid that burnt on contact. Already one of his eyes had been burnt out and he could barely see out of the other one. As he was squeezed downwards he heard a gurgling churning noise which grew louder as he rounded each of the many corners of the foul monstrous gut.

At each push his head was turned in a different direction so he couldn’t always see where he was going. He tried  to bite the side of the gut to stop himself going forward. It tasted foul but the muscular motions were far too strong and he couldn’t hold on.

For a moment he was stuck on what seemed like a fold in the gut which was contracting and pushing him slowly forward towards a small opening.

By coincidence he was turned to face his fate, right at the very edge of the precipice.  Below him was a boiling vat of liquid which must be the stomach of this creature. As the muscles gathered themselves ready to contract he had one last stream of

“…he’ll get by without his rabbit pie…”

running through his mind before his head was ejected like a cork from a bottle out and down into the foul-smelling cauldron below. He registered the searing pain of the stomach acid briefly before his life finally flickered out and his head melted to join the morass.

Extract from my NANOWRIMO work in progress

Twisted

Inspired by an image from ceirenbell@posterous.com

Watching the swarm was always exciting for me and Tommy. We thought that old Mr. Hackett being twisted and then broken up into tiny pieces was funny and we thought that watching his cows slowly coming apart bit by bit was funny too.

We felt it too, our heads were pulled all out of shape, my left arm was kind of back-to-front now and Tommy lost an eye the second time round, but it didn’t bother us much.

At school no one spoke to us but that was no different and before they’d tease us and push us around. They didn’t do that anymore.

Last week Mumma was turned inside out and we didn’t laugh at first coz she made us our dinner, but Tommy said that now we wouldn’t have to eat our greens and that made us laugh.

We ate all the ice cream that night.

Where did I put those parents?

Image by Mandajuice via Flickr

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand so much as that he just couldn’t think about it. Whenever he tried his mind became either completely blank or a mass of noise and scribble and chaos. Either way, the whole subject of housework was always problematic for him. Not that he expected anyone else to do it, well maybe he wouldn’t have minded, to be honest, but as he’d been on his own since hiding his parents, he had no one else who could do it. Theoretically, he could have hired someone but that would have meant earning some money and he hadn’t really worked that out yet either.

His parents’ money was running out fast, unless they had more hidden away somewhere, but if they did he couldn’t think of a way to find it. Asking them was out of the question of course as he’d forgotten where he’d hidden them. All he knew was that he’d hidden them ‘somewhere safe’, that old chestnut.

He’d tried the obvious places, behind the sofa, under the bed, in the shed, in the garage, in the kitchen drawer. He tried places that weren’t at all obvious, like the bathroom cabinet, his pencil case, his jacket pocket, the sugar bowl, the hamster cage and his old shoes under the bed.

All of this had got him nowhere. It had been 9 months now since he’d hidden them. He was a little bit worried about them, obviously, but mainly, he was worried about himself. How was he going to pay the mortgage when the cash ran out?  How was he going to get the house clean, get himself clean, his clothes washed? How was he going to clean up his act so that he could invite someone round or have a chance of meeting someone? He had no clue.

Although his parents were miniature parents, it didn’t mean he relied on them any less. He said to himself that he’d hidden them but in reality they were perfectly able to unhide themselves and find him, they were just choosing not to.

They were letting him use his initiative, something they’d banged on about for years. They may have been miniature but as far as he could tell they seemed to be just as big a pain in the arse as normal sized parents.