Category: Fiction

The Snowman and the Robin…a story for Christmas

Once there was a snowman, frozen still with coal black eyes. Forever staring forwards as if there were only one scene worth seeing. The kind of snowman you see here and there and everywhere when there is enough snow. Children would pass his unmoving gaze, their laughter like Christmas bells as they rubbed their frozen fingers through their snow-filled hair.
The snowman wanted to say ’hello’ and ’merry christmas’ and laugh with them as they made clumsy snow angels on the side of the hill. But he couldn’t say hello. He couldn’t move his smiling mouth made of stones. Inside he wasn’t smiling. Inside his big barrel-chest his ice heart was cold with loneliness, and a great sadness filled his fat round belly.
Soon the sun went down for the days of winter are short but sweet. The snowman stood alone at the bottom of the hill. The sky was clear and the air was colder. If the snowman could have breathed his breath would have formed icicles from his carrot nose. His body solidified more than ever and he felt stiff as stiff could be.
And so the cold days and colder nights would pass by as Christmas approached and the snowman stood firm as the children ran and played all around him. Sometimes snow would fall and add a couple of inches to the top of his straw hat, making him taller and wider. And still the children who had created him ignored him, and he felt ever more lonely.
At last it was Christmas Eve and as the sun fell beyond the trees the children scampered off one by one, ready to leave mince pies out for Santa. They left with an ache in their hearts, wishing more than ever that the morning could come quicker than the year before.
One very small boy was left, his nose red with cold in the dusk. For a moment he stared at the snowman, and then it was clear that he had an idea, as clear as if a light-bulb had actually appeared above his head. He ran up the hill and grasped handfuls of snow, packing it together with his small woolly gloves. He rolled the ball of snow back down the hill and it gathered weight and substance until it was too heavy for him to hold and it rolled under its own weight until it clumped with a thump, to rest at the foot of the snowman. The boy tumbled down after it.
He climbed upon the ball of snow he had made, so that he was eye to eye with the snowman.
“I’m so sorry Mister Snowman,” he said, “but I need your nose to feed Santa’s reindeer,”
The snowman simply stared.
“I’m sure you understand and won’t mind,” said the boy, and with that he plucked the knobbly long carrot from the middle of the poor snowman’s face and ran off.
The snowman wished he could have spoken to the boy. Of course he understood that it was important to feed Santa’s reindeer. But now his face felt even colder, left as it was with just a hole where his nose had been. He was so lonely and cold.
That night was the coldest, sparkliest, frostiest night of the year. So cold that the snowman had no choice but to fall into a deep frozen sleep. The kind of sleep with no dreams.
When midnight struck and it was at last Christmas Day, a little robin flew by, it’s redbreast filled with the joys of Christmas time. It noticed that the poor snowman looked sad in its slumber and had no nose.
The robin perched itself gently atop the snowman’s hat, puffed up the orange feathers of its chest and began to sing. The most beautiful joyous song of Christmas.
Now robins don’t normally sing at night so this was an unusual sound that floated up the hill and over the trees of the forest, far into the clear star-filled sky.
And it just so happened that at that very moment a certain sleigh was jingling past high in the sky. A sleigh that flew with nine bright reindeer pulling it joyfully forward. The first reindeer, whose name I am sure you know, heard the robin’s song as it twinkled past. He turned his head and whispered to the reindeer behind. And each reindeer in turn whispered to the next until at last the whisper made its way to Santa’s ear. And, as is so often the way of things at this time of year, Santa smiled the biggest of smiles.
The next morning, Christmas morning in fact, the snowman woke slowly as the light began to rise over the hill. He felt like he wanted to yawn and stretch from his long sleep and looking down he found that his stick arms were stretching wide and his back was flexing. He could move!
The thought made him smile even more and his stone mouth grinned just like all the children were grinning in their homes as they opened their presents. A grin just like Santa grinned.
The snowman reached up with his stick fingers and felt the new, perfect shiny carrot nose that was firmly in his face. This made him smile even more.
He looked around, and there, sat on the snowball the small boy had made, was the robin, and beyond that were all creatures of the forest, great and small.
“Merry Christmas,” said the snowman,
“Merry Christmas to you too,” said the robin, and he began to sing. Soon all the creatures of the forest were singing too, and so, would you believe, was the snowman…

© 2013 Simon Poore

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by simontall

#NaNoWriMo – ‘The Whispering of Walls’ Extract 4

So here is the final extract from my NaNoWriMo adventure this year. I managed to win and beat the fifty thousand words in the thirty days. The novel itself is going well having completed five chapters and I envisage at least another five, which would take me to a hundred thousand words. Hopefully I can manage that by the end of January. This extract is only partial as my novel does contain some quite grizzly murders, so I have only included a short part of it, not wanting to offend anyone. I do kind of wonder how these sadistic murder scenes have come out of my head and what they say about me? As ever any comments or thoughts are welcome…

The classroom had powder blue walls that had seen brighter days. The blue reached between a dado rail and a high picture rail, as if it were a sky that ringed the room. Pin holes and Sellotape marks of a thousand children’s posters scarred the surface of the paintwork, as if the walls were a flatland scoured by centuries of weathering, minuscule craters pockmarking the surface. Arched windows were placed high in the room, as if the Victorian architects had decreed it to be sinful for little children to see outside. What sinful deprivations might they see on the London streets four floors below? Now those windows were cracked but mostly intact, for they were too high for the vandal’s stones that had wreaked havoc upon the glass of the second and third floors. For it is a truth that once one window is broken by a mischievous missile then the same fate will befall all the rest. Unless, of course, the window is too high, even for the most athletic of throws.
And it is also a truth that most vandals are lazy and cowardly. It would be far too much effort to scale the high fence, with its red signs proclaiming the building to be unsafe. And even more effort would be required to break through the boarded up windows and doors of the ground floor. So, the odd little gang of street kids that did happen to pass by no longer bothered to try lobbing stones at the top floor. The second And third floor windows were all smashed, no sport there. Besides those urchin boys had better fish to fry, like playing ‘knock down ginger’ for the umpteenth time, or getting older lads to by them fags from the corner shop.
The only visitors Frances had in that top floor room, apart from him, were the pigeons who would sit and preen on the high stone window ledges. Their cooing could be soothing but their scrabbling and scraping against the glass could unnerve in the small hours of the night. But theirs wasn’t the only sound, there was the constant rumble of traffic from the nearby flyover, sometimes big lorries could rattle the windows if the wind was favourable. All those thousands of passing people; so near and yet so far.
White bird shit smears dribbled and dried on the glass, casting daubs of yellow shadow across the curling tiles of the floor and up over the few remaining wooden desks. Old school desks with lids and empty stained ink wells; carved graffiti the last evidence of their former school-hating occupants. In one high corner of the ceiling sat the large spider, manning its thin strand of web in the hope of some passing tiny winged insect, a meal that would sustain it for months. She was almost jealous of its diet.
It hardly moved for days on end, one hairy leg balanced on the strand the rest pressing the cracked paintwork. A weightless piece of life that could defy the eternal pull of gravity with a wobbling grace. When it did move it simply shifted, one or two limbs stepping sideways, as if making itself more comfortable. Never had she seen it venture away from its web. If only she could venture from the web that trapped her.
Twelve desks. School desks, with sloping lids. He had prepared it well, each desk bolted to the floor, the twelve forming a simple cross in the middle of the room. Frances was arranged lying on their surface, her arms spread wide in a crucifix, legs pointing straight down the length of the cross, her ankles even crossed, like any popular depiction of Jesus. Around her neck he had fashioned a semi-circle of curved metal; a collar screwed into the wooden lid of the desk. Similar metal half circles were screwed over her forearms and shins, although these he had made from the rusty jaws of animal traps; smaller versions of the classic bear trap, the kind of trap that if you stepped into its jaws it’s snap would maim you. Half-circles of metal with rusted teeth that pressed her skin. Just to be sure he had used copious amounts of strong black gaffer tape, over her wrists and ankles, waist and chest. Stomach bulging and breasts flopping in between the stripes of tape.
It had struck her, absurdly, that she knew what Gulliver felt like when the Lilliputians had tied him to the sand. The spider was her Lilliputian, a small creature observing with eyes on stalks from its vantage point above her giant form, spread-eagled on the children’s desks.
“Help!” she shouted, “Help me!”

© 2013 Simon Poore

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by simontall