TABI’S FLASH TUESDAYS
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11.19.24
Nests of Echoes - Tim Goldstone
Originally published online in Clash, Oct 2018; and later online in Dark Fire, July 2022.
The New Forest. Hampshire. England. 1872.
Harsh social and economic conditions throughout the countryside ferment a febrile unrest in which cults and sects flourish, desperate for a better life, in this or another world.
This gathering have only two acres on which to live. Here in the dark corners where the human eye cannot penetrate, or instinctively chooses not to, are nests of echoes where in summer piles of feathers crackle like fire, and in winter the air in the shadows catches in the back of the throat.
Since she’d joined she hadn’t felt confident enough to talk to any of the community. She’d watched them though. What immediately stood out was Grenn’s effortless proficiency with rope and knot. When she’d first seen him it had been a cold clear morning of slime trail and spider web made bright and glorious by the fourth day of a keen hunger.
They entered the gloomy interior of a small outbuilding, where on the exterior walls last spring’s communally applied coat of hastily slapped-on too-thin whitewash was now being peeled off by wind and rain, leaving large raggedy patches of open stone. The noose Grenn had made and thrown over the thick internal wood-beam would have been admired by even the most exacting of hangmen. She foresaw, but could not change – her gift, her curse – that unseen rot in the wood-beam would compromise the integrity of the drop, preventing the efficient split second snap of a neck and that here in the dense air there would be creaking and kicking and convulsing, and woodlice tumbling, before death would come at last as the divine metamorphosis they had all been promised, and that she would be chanting with the motley group the villagers would soon be calling monsters, and that as they filed out afterwards what she would notice most would be flakes of whitewash sticking to the soles of everyone’s cold bare dirty feet; and that later in the day’s gloaming, two thin cats, bedraggled in the torrential rain, would circle each other in the mud, spines arched, emitting haunting baby cries as she watches a militia man in uniform vomiting, and soon afterwards she would be led away by rough stupid hands with grips that indicate dissent will me met with brutal violence – until she hears their hoarsely whispered words, furious, cheated – "She’s vanished.” But she hasn’t.
She has taken her place in the echoes.
Tim Goldstone writes because it’s a less painful way of seeing what’s inside him than an invasive medical procedure. His words are all over the place – in crumpled bits of paper in his pockets to literary magazines and anthologies and in scripts broadcast on podcasts, radio,TV, stage.