Days 248 and 249 – Writing exercise

…

When I woke I knew I was going to be on a world of pain. Whatever the head of operations was thinking when he sent Maria in as backup obviously forgot the last time he made the same mistake.

It got us both captured, simply because she wasn’t capable of remembering basic details of her cover story.

We all had bad days, but she seemed to have more than most.  And I don’t know why operations thought that she could help me.

Not in that last delicate stage.

And it was there.  The trade was being made, everyone had got over their jitters, and then Boris had to ask, why I’ll never know, where she said she came from, a question he had asked earlier with an answer that satisfied him, Bratislava.

The second time she hesitated, and that was the moment I realised she must have made it up and couldn’t remember the lie, saying, Vienna.

And two seconds later we had no trade and eight guns on us.  I was surprised we were not executed there and then.

Instead I was in a dungeon, certainly underground, damp and dank.  And cold enough to make me shiver, though I think my current situation had something to do with it as well.

At least I was not tied up, which in itself was a worry.  I didn’t think Boris was underestimating my capabilities, because he didn’t seem the sort of adversary that would.  He’d managed to survive a long time on the murky world of betrayal.

This had been our chance.

It was quite dark, and I could barely see anything, other than a shard of light coming from under the door at the top of the stairs.  The floor space, or what I could discern of it, was almost entirely taken up by boxes stacked on boxes, and random items of furniture.

I was sitting in an old lounge chair, one of three.  And when I looked harder, I could see Maria asleep in another, a short distance from me.

I suppressed the urge to strangle her.

It was not the first time we had been in this situation.  Last time, we had simply been abandoned, with a ticking time bomb.

Literally.

Who knew one of her many talents was disarming bombs?

It didn’t make up for getting us put in the building in the first place.

She stirred, but didn’t wake.

Perhaps my anger was misdirected.  I should strangle the operations officer who sent her to me after I had specifically said I would not work with her again, and that this mission needed only one person to see it through.

Or perhaps I should be disappointed in the Director, who told me that it would not happen a second time.  Which led to the supposition; were they trying to get rid of me?

I heard a thump upstairs, followed by muffled voices and shuffling feet.  Had someone come to look for us after missing the check-in after the deal was completed?

Surely operations wouldn’t compound the problem by sending an operative to rescue us.

The door at the top of the stairs rattled, then I heard the distinct sound of a key turning in the lock.  It opened and a body was shoved through the gap, sliding down the stairs to the landing.  Before the dust had settled, the door closed again.

How many other bodies were lying around down here?.

I got up, then fell back in the chair, my head suddenly spinning out of control.  I’d obviously been drugged before being thrown or carried down.

The second time I was more cautious and slowly stood up.  Less spinning, but still coming in waves, until after a few minutes it abated, and I could stand.

Another few minutes before I could get up the stairs and check the pulse of the new arrival. 

None.

I guess my hand being covered in blood told me he or she was dead.  It was hard to tell anything in the gloom.  I went back down and took the extra few steps towards Maria.

I felt for a pulse but it was not necessary.  A hand on my arm told me she was awake.  She probably had been the whole time.

“Who is he?” She asked.

“If it is a he, no idea.  And dead.”

“Why are we still alive?”

“We are of value to Boris.”

She took a moment to think about that, and perhaps how she was going to explain how this all went sideways.

“I’m sorry.”

I thought about that for a second.  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be if we get out of this.”

Perhaps I was overreacting but I was still angry.

She sighed.  “It was necessary.”

Of course.  Enough time had passed for her to formulate a story, one that I might believe.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

She let my hand go. “Be that as it may, you pissed someone off and they sent me. Believe me, if I had a choice…” She sighed again, realising it wouldn’t matter what she said. “It wasn’t my idea. I told them that if you saw me again, you’d shoot me yourself.”

I had made a similar threat to the director and the head of operations, and I thought they got the message.  I was wrong.

Or worse, this was how they removed troublesome operatives who had problems with working in a team.  Especially after they sent me to the training camp to try and eradicate the lone wolf tendency.

That’s what they called it.  The lone wolf tendency.

I flopped back in the chair and closed my eyes. I was still feeling scathing from the aftereffects of the drugs, and the disappointment of a botched operation. “Why was it necessary this time? And why was it necessary to send you, of all people?”

“They needed a distraction.”

They?  Why would they need a distraction?  Then I remembered a drinking session with one of the instructors, in a small inn near the training grounds, the day I discovered he was nursing old wounds.

Wounds that few people were aware of.

And the lamentable story of operations that were wheels within wheels, operations that operatives were given a part to play but not given the whole story, operations that came apart because the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

We had to learn to compartmentalise and adapt.  That sometimes we would come up against our own people playing a role, or that we would be working around the edges of a much larger operation.  Sometimes we would be told enough; sometimes we would not.

My last operation I was not fully briefed and found myself being removed before it interfered in another much more important operation.  To me, it seemed like bad planning.

Wheels within wheels.

This suddenly felt like one of those operations.

“What else is going on here?”  Obviously they needed my exchange shut down.  Why?

“You know better than to ask me.  I know less than you. And like you I just do as I am told.”

“Last time it nearly got us killed.”  Much the same as this time.

“That wasn’t the expected outcome, well, not mine anyway.  You’ll be happy to learn that earned me a ticket to the lone wolf tendency programme.  I prefer to work alone, and I get the feeling they’re punishing me.”

I wasn’t quite at the point where I would come to that conclusion, but it was a theory with merit.  It would explain the extended hiatus ordered by the new director a year ago, rumoured to be part of a government oversight committee request for reorganisation and more transparency.

In covert intelligence operations?

We had to work in a vacuum, with little oversight and absolutely no transparency.  The former director, the man who recruited me, believed in results, not pandering to oversight committees.

The door above us rattled again.  I looked up as a key was inserted in the lock.  I turned to tell her to disappear, but she had already.  Silently.

The door opened and light flooded the room.  I was standing in the middle of what might be called a halo of light.

All i could see was a shadowy outline at the top of the stairs.

“Where’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The one you were talking to.”

“That was my imaginary friend. When I woke up I was alone. And then my new friend arrived. I was looking at the body, “but he’s not talking.”

He aimed his gun and fired off a round. I heard it hit the seat did just been sitting in.

“Where is she?”

I shrugged.  “If there was someone here, then they’ve gone, because when I woke up, there was no one here.  Come down, check for yourself.”

“Or I can just shoot you.”

“And then I would have no value.  You tell me how I can help you, and I’ll do my best to get it.”

“I want to know where the girl is?”

“You and me both.  I have more reason to strangle her than you, believe me.”

He came down a few steps and stopped on the landing.  I caught the movement of a shadow behind the stairs, and then nothing.  He had to come down a few more steps before she could attack.

If that was her plan.

The closer I got, the more clearly I could see him, but it was not anyone I recognised, and was not one of the men I’d been dealing with for the exchange.

Had we been taken to a different place?  It didn’t explain why we were still alive.  Boris was not the sort to keep people who crossed him alive.

“Where’s Boris? He and I still have business to conduct.”

“He is gone.  Business done.  You are lucky.  You are both worth a great deal of money, the girl more than you.  Now, enough small talk.  Where is she?”

I shrugged.  “There is no girl down here.  I looked.  Nothing but boxes, old newspapers, and furniture.  And that man you killed.  Who was he?”

“Your pathetic rescue mission.”

He took another two steps, and then crouched to peer through the stairs behind him.  The next moment he was falling backwards down the stairs, the gun going off twice, both deafening.  I grabbed the gun and yanked it out of his hand as it fired again and I could just feel the bullet graze my arm.

One kick took the fight out of him, just as another shadow appeared in the doorway.  I had to move quickly just before a volley of shots rang out.

It took almost too long to get the gun in my hand and fire back, and I was only able to get a shot off because he hadn’t moved.

If he had the outcome would have been a lot worse.  He fired again, but those were random shots, as he tumbled headfirst down the stairs and, falling on the body on the landing, dislodged it and together they landed on the floor at my feet.

I spent another bullet making sure he wouldn’t come back to life at an awkward moment.

Maria came out from behind the stairs and wrenched the gun out of the hand of the second gunman. 

“You hesitated.  Could’ve been the difference.”

She simply glared at me like I was a novice.

I shook my head.  No point explaining glaring lights and drug aftereffects to her.  Like the instructors said, there were no excuses, just dead people who missed their moment.

“You first.”  I decided to see if she baulked.

She didn’t.  The steps now clear we went up and then took up a position either side of the door.  If this was a babysitting operation, there would be only two.  If it was something else, there would be more.

She peered out; I did likewise.  There was no one in the passage.

A few minutes later we established there was no one else in the building.

There were cell phones and vehicle keys on the table, along with half eaten food and drink.  Our rescuer must have interrupted them.

Maria picked up one of the phones.  “No security.  The guy made a call to a burner about five minutes ago.  I looked at the other.  Equally insecure.  It had three numbers in its call log.

There was a text, with our photos and instructions to wait until called.  That call had been while outer captors had come to visit. 

“We should leave,” I said.

We both heard screeching tyres of several vehicles. 

“Too late.  CCTV.  Just noticed it,” she said.  “No trust in the world any more.”

The next few seconds bracing ourselves, and then machine gun fire.  Somebody decided they didn’t like us.  That lasted a minute, then stopped.  Glass, brick and wood settled and dust filled the air, thick enough to hide an onslaught.

That was the distraction so that another team could get around the back so they could attack on two fronts.

The phone in my hand rang.

Maria looked annoyed.

I answered it.  Boris’ voice.  “You apparently have angered your masters and they’ve put a price on both your heads.”

That was a shock.

“When?”

“As of the moment you broke out of the cellar.  I was not the one holding you, but I’d be foolish not to take up the contract.”

“Thanks.”

“I propose a deal though.  You get to walk away if you’ve got a half million.  I’ll tell them you’re dead, or at least as dead as I want you to be, and you have to disappear.”

‘You want to play dead, live another day?”

“How much?

“Quarter million.”

“How dead is dead?”

“No going back?”

“They’re our people out there?”

“Apparently.  Boris is offering us a way out.”

Another 30-second spray this time from the front and the back.  More dust and disintegrating building materials.  It wouldn’t be long before they came in and finished the job.

The shooting stopped.  She said, “Take it.  We’ll sort out the details later.”

“Done,” I said into the phone, just as movement came from the front, the full front on assault.

…

People do not get put on a hit list for no reason.

That reason sometimes can be very obscure.

Boris didn’t know what the reason was, only that it was an opportunity to make money.  Ideology was far less of a motivation than becoming fabulously wealthy and Boris was well on the way.

He was, by self-confession, a businessman, and he had no feelings one way of the other about whether we lived or died.

And in doing business, he had no qualms about us coming after him after the dust had settled simply because he had a code of ethics.  Twisted perhaps, but we discovered quite to our surprise he was a man of his word.

Better than some people we knew, or perhaps more appropriately. Who were more acquaintances, people we didn’t really know at all.

That quarter million bought us safety, an Academy Award-winning make-up artist who made us the best-looking corpses ever, and a ticket to a run-down, badly in need of repairs cottage somewhere in Tuscany.

We spent a lot of time covered in a different sort of building rubble, almost unrecognisable as out former selves and much liked by all those around us, although like anyone where someone new and strange moves in, they were initially wary.

Did we miss being agents pretending we were saving the world?  Yes and no.

Did we find out why we were had a hit order on us? Accidentally.

I was in London about a year later.  There was, by this time, no one who would recognise the old me, i had changed that much. 

It was at a random cafe, and I saw a man named Giles, a relative of the Director- nepotism at its worst.  He was an arrogant fool who honestly believed as the Director’s son-in-law, he had the same authority.

I cam out with a coffee in a take away cup and decided did but at his table.  It was rather crowded.

“Alan Giles, isn’t it?”

His head snapped up from the paper he was reading.

“Who are you?”

“We did Uni together.  Cambridge.  You won’t remember me, but I was that extra in the table, the one everyone ignored unutilised they needed help with assignments and exams.”

“Name?’

“You won’t remember.  No one else has.”

“Not surprising.  Go away.”

It was like he was talking to a stray dog.

“You finished up in Department F.  With your uncle.  You were always banging on about how he needed someone ofvyourvextraordinary deductive powers. Police or something.  You get that job?”

He would either tell me to mind my own business, or instead talk about himself, failing to understand the Official Secrets Act was there for a reason.

He looked at me like I was stupid.

“I run the department, have done for ages.  Did a clean out, got rid of all the dinosaurs Uncle Peter kept on.”

“Fired them?”

“God no.  You don’t fire them.  That comes back and bites you later on.  No.  We found a more permanent solution.  Well, I did.  He was going to simply put them out to pasture.”

“Poor people.”

He shook his heard.  “You don’t know the half of it.”  He caught sight of someone behind me and folded his paper. “Got to go.  Please don’t annoy me again, or there will be consequences.”

I got up just as a woman arrived.  I recognised her. Alison, the Director’s personal assistant. “Who are you?”, then stopped for a second, giving me a curious look.

I’d only met her twice.

“Do I know you, you seem familiar.”

“No.  You couldn’t.  I was at University with Alan.  He was an inspiration to all other average students.”  I tried not to dip it on to much sarcasm, but I guess I failed.

“Be off with you,” he said. 

I shrugged.  “Nice meeting you again, Alan.”

It was.  It answered a long-standing question.  Who set the dogs on us?

…

When I got back home, Maria was in the middle of making her version of fettuccine carbonara, a dish I had to say was one of my favourites.

“Get it all done?” She asked.

A slight rearrangement of our banking.  And a small unforeseen side job.

She looked up, that trademark flour coating on her clothes and smudge on her forehead.   It was hard to say if she was a better spy than a cook or vice versa.

“What needed to be done, yes.”

It had given me a few days to ponder the new life we had, and how much it meant to be alive, when if truth be known, we should not be.  It was hard to have to disappear and not put your head up.

And not be living that vicarious lifestyle.

Just before I left we had a heartfelt discussion about what we had then versus what we had now.  I think both us needed something else, but neither of us felt we could trust any agency again.

And while we had a perceived target on our backs…

Except now…

She noticed the change in my demeanour.  It was very hard to hide.

“What?  Something happened, didn’t it?”

“It was a right place right time moment. The sort you only get once in a lifetime.

I left it there for a minute.

She was holding a wooden spoon and at the end of that minute looked like she was going through throw it at me. “What?”

“I ran into Giles.”

“The Director’s nephew?  Slimy Giles?”

He held special significance for three of the female recruits.  On a visit to the training facility he thought he could use his position, inviting them to dinner with benefits.  It didn’t quite work out the way he would have liked.

Two were washed out; the third was standing opposite me.

“He picked the same cafe I did.  He had no idea who I was, other than he believed he went to uni with me.  I was asking him about the job, and he told me he was on a special commission to permanently remove the dinosaurs.  His words.  He sanctioned the operation that included a dozen good agents.”

“Tell me you returned the favour?”

I nodded.

“Good.”  She sighed.  “That target was off our backs.  He was always going to be the stumbling block if we got bored with this life.”

“Are you bored?”

“No.  Had we not been thrown together like this, and got the opportunity to discover a completely different life? I’m pretty sure I’d be dead now, going out in a blaze of glory. But sometimes I wake up and wonder if there was something else I could be doing. Every now and then.”

Boris had left a burner phone, and an offer that if we ever wanted a job, he might be able to help.  She hadn’t mentioned it, but I could feel it was in her thoughts.

“Well, Boris…”

She smiled.  I knew that smile, the cat that ate the canary.

“Speaking of Boris…”

…

©  Charles Heath  2026

Days 248 and 249 – Writing exercise

…

When I woke I knew I was going to be on a world of pain. Whatever the head of operations was thinking when he sent Maria in as backup obviously forgot the last time he made the same mistake.

It got us both captured, simply because she wasn’t capable of remembering basic details of her cover story.

We all had bad days, but she seemed to have more than most.  And I don’t know why operations thought that she could help me.

Not in that last delicate stage.

And it was there.  The trade was being made, everyone had got over their jitters, and then Boris had to ask, why I’ll never know, where she said she came from, a question he had asked earlier with an answer that satisfied him, Bratislava.

The second time she hesitated, and that was the moment I realised she must have made it up and couldn’t remember the lie, saying, Vienna.

And two seconds later we had no trade and eight guns on us.  I was surprised we were not executed there and then.

Instead I was in a dungeon, certainly underground, damp and dank.  And cold enough to make me shiver, though I think my current situation had something to do with it as well.

At least I was not tied up, which in itself was a worry.  I didn’t think Boris was underestimating my capabilities, because he didn’t seem the sort of adversary that would.  He’d managed to survive a long time on the murky world of betrayal.

This had been our chance.

It was quite dark, and I could barely see anything, other than a shard of light coming from under the door at the top of the stairs.  The floor space, or what I could discern of it, was almost entirely taken up by boxes stacked on boxes, and random items of furniture.

I was sitting in an old lounge chair, one of three.  And when I looked harder, I could see Maria asleep in another, a short distance from me.

I suppressed the urge to strangle her.

It was not the first time we had been in this situation.  Last time, we had simply been abandoned, with a ticking time bomb.

Literally.

Who knew one of her many talents was disarming bombs?

It didn’t make up for getting us put in the building in the first place.

She stirred, but didn’t wake.

Perhaps my anger was misdirected.  I should strangle the operations officer who sent her to me after I had specifically said I would not work with her again, and that this mission needed only one person to see it through.

Or perhaps I should be disappointed in the Director, who told me that it would not happen a second time.  Which led to the supposition; were they trying to get rid of me?

I heard a thump upstairs, followed by muffled voices and shuffling feet.  Had someone come to look for us after missing the check-in after the deal was completed?

Surely operations wouldn’t compound the problem by sending an operative to rescue us.

The door at the top of the stairs rattled, then I heard the distinct sound of a key turning in the lock.  It opened and a body was shoved through the gap, sliding down the stairs to the landing.  Before the dust had settled, the door closed again.

How many other bodies were lying around down here?.

I got up, then fell back in the chair, my head suddenly spinning out of control.  I’d obviously been drugged before being thrown or carried down.

The second time I was more cautious and slowly stood up.  Less spinning, but still coming in waves, until after a few minutes it abated, and I could stand.

Another few minutes before I could get up the stairs and check the pulse of the new arrival. 

None.

I guess my hand being covered in blood told me he or she was dead.  It was hard to tell anything in the gloom.  I went back down and took the extra few steps towards Maria.

I felt for a pulse but it was not necessary.  A hand on my arm told me she was awake.  She probably had been the whole time.

“Who is he?” She asked.

“If it is a he, no idea.  And dead.”

“Why are we still alive?”

“We are of value to Boris.”

She took a moment to think about that, and perhaps how she was going to explain how this all went sideways.

“I’m sorry.”

I thought about that for a second.  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be if we get out of this.”

Perhaps I was overreacting but I was still angry.

She sighed.  “It was necessary.”

Of course.  Enough time had passed for her to formulate a story, one that I might believe.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

She let my hand go. “Be that as it may, you pissed someone off and they sent me. Believe me, if I had a choice…” She sighed again, realising it wouldn’t matter what she said. “It wasn’t my idea. I told them that if you saw me again, you’d shoot me yourself.”

I had made a similar threat to the director and the head of operations, and I thought they got the message.  I was wrong.

Or worse, this was how they removed troublesome operatives who had problems with working in a team.  Especially after they sent me to the training camp to try and eradicate the lone wolf tendency.

That’s what they called it.  The lone wolf tendency.

I flopped back in the chair and closed my eyes. I was still feeling scathing from the aftereffects of the drugs, and the disappointment of a botched operation. “Why was it necessary this time? And why was it necessary to send you, of all people?”

“They needed a distraction.”

They?  Why would they need a distraction?  Then I remembered a drinking session with one of the instructors, in a small inn near the training grounds, the day I discovered he was nursing old wounds.

Wounds that few people were aware of.

And the lamentable story of operations that were wheels within wheels, operations that operatives were given a part to play but not given the whole story, operations that came apart because the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

We had to learn to compartmentalise and adapt.  That sometimes we would come up against our own people playing a role, or that we would be working around the edges of a much larger operation.  Sometimes we would be told enough; sometimes we would not.

My last operation I was not fully briefed and found myself being removed before it interfered in another much more important operation.  To me, it seemed like bad planning.

Wheels within wheels.

This suddenly felt like one of those operations.

“What else is going on here?”  Obviously they needed my exchange shut down.  Why?

“You know better than to ask me.  I know less than you. And like you I just do as I am told.”

“Last time it nearly got us killed.”  Much the same as this time.

“That wasn’t the expected outcome, well, not mine anyway.  You’ll be happy to learn that earned me a ticket to the lone wolf tendency programme.  I prefer to work alone, and I get the feeling they’re punishing me.”

I wasn’t quite at the point where I would come to that conclusion, but it was a theory with merit.  It would explain the extended hiatus ordered by the new director a year ago, rumoured to be part of a government oversight committee request for reorganisation and more transparency.

In covert intelligence operations?

We had to work in a vacuum, with little oversight and absolutely no transparency.  The former director, the man who recruited me, believed in results, not pandering to oversight committees.

The door above us rattled again.  I looked up as a key was inserted in the lock.  I turned to tell her to disappear, but she had already.  Silently.

The door opened and light flooded the room.  I was standing in the middle of what might be called a halo of light.

All i could see was a shadowy outline at the top of the stairs.

“Where’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The one you were talking to.”

“That was my imaginary friend. When I woke up I was alone. And then my new friend arrived. I was looking at the body, “but he’s not talking.”

He aimed his gun and fired off a round. I heard it hit the seat did just been sitting in.

“Where is she?”

I shrugged.  “If there was someone here, then they’ve gone, because when I woke up, there was no one here.  Come down, check for yourself.”

“Or I can just shoot you.”

“And then I would have no value.  You tell me how I can help you, and I’ll do my best to get it.”

“I want to know where the girl is?”

“You and me both.  I have more reason to strangle her than you, believe me.”

He came down a few steps and stopped on the landing.  I caught the movement of a shadow behind the stairs, and then nothing.  He had to come down a few more steps before she could attack.

If that was her plan.

The closer I got, the more clearly I could see him, but it was not anyone I recognised, and was not one of the men I’d been dealing with for the exchange.

Had we been taken to a different place?  It didn’t explain why we were still alive.  Boris was not the sort to keep people who crossed him alive.

“Where’s Boris? He and I still have business to conduct.”

“He is gone.  Business done.  You are lucky.  You are both worth a great deal of money, the girl more than you.  Now, enough small talk.  Where is she?”

I shrugged.  “There is no girl down here.  I looked.  Nothing but boxes, old newspapers, and furniture.  And that man you killed.  Who was he?”

“Your pathetic rescue mission.”

He took another two steps, and then crouched to peer through the stairs behind him.  The next moment he was falling backwards down the stairs, the gun going off twice, both deafening.  I grabbed the gun and yanked it out of his hand as it fired again and I could just feel the bullet graze my arm.

One kick took the fight out of him, just as another shadow appeared in the doorway.  I had to move quickly just before a volley of shots rang out.

It took almost too long to get the gun in my hand and fire back, and I was only able to get a shot off because he hadn’t moved.

If he had the outcome would have been a lot worse.  He fired again, but those were random shots, as he tumbled headfirst down the stairs and, falling on the body on the landing, dislodged it and together they landed on the floor at my feet.

I spent another bullet making sure he wouldn’t come back to life at an awkward moment.

Maria came out from behind the stairs and wrenched the gun out of the hand of the second gunman. 

“You hesitated.  Could’ve been the difference.”

She simply glared at me like I was a novice.

I shook my head.  No point explaining glaring lights and drug aftereffects to her.  Like the instructors said, there were no excuses, just dead people who missed their moment.

“You first.”  I decided to see if she baulked.

She didn’t.  The steps now clear we went up and then took up a position either side of the door.  If this was a babysitting operation, there would be only two.  If it was something else, there would be more.

She peered out; I did likewise.  There was no one in the passage.

A few minutes later we established there was no one else in the building.

There were cell phones and vehicle keys on the table, along with half eaten food and drink.  Our rescuer must have interrupted them.

Maria picked up one of the phones.  “No security.  The guy made a call to a burner about five minutes ago.  I looked at the other.  Equally insecure.  It had three numbers in its call log.

There was a text, with our photos and instructions to wait until called.  That call had been while outer captors had come to visit. 

“We should leave,” I said.

We both heard screeching tyres of several vehicles. 

“Too late.  CCTV.  Just noticed it,” she said.  “No trust in the world any more.”

The next few seconds bracing ourselves, and then machine gun fire.  Somebody decided they didn’t like us.  That lasted a minute, then stopped.  Glass, brick and wood settled and dust filled the air, thick enough to hide an onslaught.

That was the distraction so that another team could get around the back so they could attack on two fronts.

The phone in my hand rang.

Maria looked annoyed.

I answered it.  Boris’ voice.  “You apparently have angered your masters and they’ve put a price on both your heads.”

That was a shock.

“When?”

“As of the moment you broke out of the cellar.  I was not the one holding you, but I’d be foolish not to take up the contract.”

“Thanks.”

“I propose a deal though.  You get to walk away if you’ve got a half million.  I’ll tell them you’re dead, or at least as dead as I want you to be, and you have to disappear.”

‘You want to play dead, live another day?”

“How much?

“Quarter million.”

“How dead is dead?”

“No going back?”

“They’re our people out there?”

“Apparently.  Boris is offering us a way out.”

Another 30-second spray this time from the front and the back.  More dust and disintegrating building materials.  It wouldn’t be long before they came in and finished the job.

The shooting stopped.  She said, “Take it.  We’ll sort out the details later.”

“Done,” I said into the phone, just as movement came from the front, the full front on assault.

…

People do not get put on a hit list for no reason.

That reason sometimes can be very obscure.

Boris didn’t know what the reason was, only that it was an opportunity to make money.  Ideology was far less of a motivation than becoming fabulously wealthy and Boris was well on the way.

He was, by self-confession, a businessman, and he had no feelings one way of the other about whether we lived or died.

And in doing business, he had no qualms about us coming after him after the dust had settled simply because he had a code of ethics.  Twisted perhaps, but we discovered quite to our surprise he was a man of his word.

Better than some people we knew, or perhaps more appropriately. Who were more acquaintances, people we didn’t really know at all.

That quarter million bought us safety, an Academy Award-winning make-up artist who made us the best-looking corpses ever, and a ticket to a run-down, badly in need of repairs cottage somewhere in Tuscany.

We spent a lot of time covered in a different sort of building rubble, almost unrecognisable as out former selves and much liked by all those around us, although like anyone where someone new and strange moves in, they were initially wary.

Did we miss being agents pretending we were saving the world?  Yes and no.

Did we find out why we were had a hit order on us? Accidentally.

I was in London about a year later.  There was, by this time, no one who would recognise the old me, i had changed that much. 

It was at a random cafe, and I saw a man named Giles, a relative of the Director- nepotism at its worst.  He was an arrogant fool who honestly believed as the Director’s son-in-law, he had the same authority.

I cam out with a coffee in a take away cup and decided did but at his table.  It was rather crowded.

“Alan Giles, isn’t it?”

His head snapped up from the paper he was reading.

“Who are you?”

“We did Uni together.  Cambridge.  You won’t remember me, but I was that extra in the table, the one everyone ignored unutilised they needed help with assignments and exams.”

“Name?’

“You won’t remember.  No one else has.”

“Not surprising.  Go away.”

It was like he was talking to a stray dog.

“You finished up in Department F.  With your uncle.  You were always banging on about how he needed someone ofvyourvextraordinary deductive powers. Police or something.  You get that job?”

He would either tell me to mind my own business, or instead talk about himself, failing to understand the Official Secrets Act was there for a reason.

He looked at me like I was stupid.

“I run the department, have done for ages.  Did a clean out, got rid of all the dinosaurs Uncle Peter kept on.”

“Fired them?”

“God no.  You don’t fire them.  That comes back and bites you later on.  No.  We found a more permanent solution.  Well, I did.  He was going to simply put them out to pasture.”

“Poor people.”

He shook his heard.  “You don’t know the half of it.”  He caught sight of someone behind me and folded his paper. “Got to go.  Please don’t annoy me again, or there will be consequences.”

I got up just as a woman arrived.  I recognised her. Alison, the Director’s personal assistant. “Who are you?”, then stopped for a second, giving me a curious look.

I’d only met her twice.

“Do I know you, you seem familiar.”

“No.  You couldn’t.  I was at University with Alan.  He was an inspiration to all other average students.”  I tried not to dip it on to much sarcasm, but I guess I failed.

“Be off with you,” he said. 

I shrugged.  “Nice meeting you again, Alan.”

It was.  It answered a long-standing question.  Who set the dogs on us?

…

When I got back home, Maria was in the middle of making her version of fettuccine carbonara, a dish I had to say was one of my favourites.

“Get it all done?” She asked.

A slight rearrangement of our banking.  And a small unforeseen side job.

She looked up, that trademark flour coating on her clothes and smudge on her forehead.   It was hard to say if she was a better spy than a cook or vice versa.

“What needed to be done, yes.”

It had given me a few days to ponder the new life we had, and how much it meant to be alive, when if truth be known, we should not be.  It was hard to have to disappear and not put your head up.

And not be living that vicarious lifestyle.

Just before I left we had a heartfelt discussion about what we had then versus what we had now.  I think both us needed something else, but neither of us felt we could trust any agency again.

And while we had a perceived target on our backs…

Except now…

She noticed the change in my demeanour.  It was very hard to hide.

“What?  Something happened, didn’t it?”

“It was a right place right time moment. The sort you only get once in a lifetime.

I left it there for a minute.

She was holding a wooden spoon and at the end of that minute looked like she was going through throw it at me. “What?”

“I ran into Giles.”

“The Director’s nephew?  Slimy Giles?”

He held special significance for three of the female recruits.  On a visit to the training facility he thought he could use his position, inviting them to dinner with benefits.  It didn’t quite work out the way he would have liked.

Two were washed out; the third was standing opposite me.

“He picked the same cafe I did.  He had no idea who I was, other than he believed he went to uni with me.  I was asking him about the job, and he told me he was on a special commission to permanently remove the dinosaurs.  His words.  He sanctioned the operation that included a dozen good agents.”

“Tell me you returned the favour?”

I nodded.

“Good.”  She sighed.  “That target was off our backs.  He was always going to be the stumbling block if we got bored with this life.”

“Are you bored?”

“No.  Had we not been thrown together like this, and got the opportunity to discover a completely different life? I’m pretty sure I’d be dead now, going out in a blaze of glory. But sometimes I wake up and wonder if there was something else I could be doing. Every now and then.”

Boris had left a burner phone, and an offer that if we ever wanted a job, he might be able to help.  She hadn’t mentioned it, but I could feel it was in her thoughts.

“Well, Boris…”

She smiled.  I knew that smile, the cat that ate the canary.

“Speaking of Boris…”

…

©  Charles Heath  2026

Day 247 – Fear of the blank page

…

Naked Truths: How to Overcome the Fear of the Blank Page (Without Actually Imagining Your Readers Undressed)

We’ve all heard the classic public speaking advice: “If you’re nervous, just picture the audience in their underwear.”

The logic goes that by reducing a room full of judging, critical humans down to their skivvies, they instantly lose their intimidating aura. Suddenly, you aren’t presenting to a board of directors or a room full of peers; you’re talking to a bunch of regular folks in polka-dot boxers and lace bralettes.

It’s silly, slightly absurd, and wildly ineffective for most people (mostly because picturing your boss in tighty-whities usually causes more anxiety, not less).

However, the psychology behind the trick is solid. It’s about reframing the power dynamic. It’s about stripping away the manufactured pressure of a situation to reveal the simple, human reality underneath.

So, how do we translate this concept to the writer’s ultimate nemesis: the fear of the blank page?

When facing a pristine, glowing white document, writers don’t usually fear the paper. They fear judgment. They fear failure. They fear that what they write won’t be smart, profound, or polished enough.

If you want to conquer the blank page, you need to strip it of its power. Here is how to apply the “underwear rule” to your writing process and finally start typing.

---

1. Realize the Page Isn’t a Masterpiece Waiting to Happen (It’s Laundry)

When a blank page feels intimidating, it’s usually because we’ve put it on a pedestal. We treat the cursor like a spotlight and the first sentence like a literary legacy.

The Translation: Strip the page of its dignity.

Accept right now that your first draft is going to be messy, awkward, and poorly fitted—much like wearing mismatched underwear on laundry day. A blank page isn’t a marble slab waiting for a Michelangelo; it’s a dumping ground for half-formed thoughts. Give yourself permission to write absolute garbage. You cannot edit a blank page, but you can fix a terribly written paragraph.

2. Picture Your Reader as a Friend (Or Just a Person)

When we write, we often imagine an intimidating, anonymous crowd reading our work with crossed arms and red pens. We write for “The Internet,” “The Critics,” or “My High School English Teacher.”

The Translation: Strip your audience of their intimidating title.

Instead of imagining a faceless mob of critics, picture one specific, friendly person. Write an email to your best friend explaining the concept. Talk to your sibling. When you shift your mental audience from “The Public” to “One Individual,” the stakes instantly lower. You stop trying to sound like a textbook and start sounding like a human being.

3. Change What You’re Wearing (Digital Disguises)

Sometimes the environment contributes to the intimidation factor. Staring at a blinking cursor in a professional, stark-white word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs feels like sitting in the principal’s office.

The Translation: Change the aesthetic.

Just like dressing down changes your confidence, changing your writing environment can strip away the pressure.

• Use a distraction-free writing app with a dark mode (like Typora, Scrivener, or Ulysses) so the page isn’t glaring at you.
• Write your first draft in Comic Sans or a goofy font—it’s scientifically impossible to take a sentence seriously when it’s written in Comic Sans, which instantly kills your inner perfectionist.
• Write the first version by hand in a cheap notebook where mistakes don’t carry the finality of a digital delete key.

4. Write the “Unpublishable” Intro

The hardest part of any journey is the first step, and the hardest part of any article or story is the first sentence. We agonize over hooks, desperately trying to start with a bang.

The Translation: Start with a terrible warm-up.

Give yourself a rule: The first three sentences are not allowed to be good. Write intentionally bad sentences to break the ice.

• “I have no idea what I’m writing about right now, but my coffee is cold.”
• “This is going to be a really stupid article about writing.”

Once you break the silence of the page—even with nonsense—the spell is broken. You’ve crossed the threshold. Now you can delete the garbage intro and get to the real work.

---

The Bottom Line

The fear of the blank page is just performance anxiety in disguise.

Just like public speaking, writing triggers our deepest insecurities about being seen and judged. But the next time you freeze up in front of a flashing cursor, remember the core lesson of the “underwear” trick: The things intimidating you only have power because you gave it to them.

Strip the page of its perfectionism. Strip the audience of their judgment. Stop waiting for the muse to show up in a three-piece suit, and start writing in your sweatpants.

…

Day 247 – Fear of the blank page

…

Naked Truths: How to Overcome the Fear of the Blank Page (Without Actually Imagining Your Readers Undressed)

We’ve all heard the classic public speaking advice: “If you’re nervous, just picture the audience in their underwear.”

The logic goes that by reducing a room full of judging, critical humans down to their skivvies, they instantly lose their intimidating aura. Suddenly, you aren’t presenting to a board of directors or a room full of peers; you’re talking to a bunch of regular folks in polka-dot boxers and lace bralettes.

It’s silly, slightly absurd, and wildly ineffective for most people (mostly because picturing your boss in tighty-whities usually causes more anxiety, not less).

However, the psychology behind the trick is solid. It’s about reframing the power dynamic. It’s about stripping away the manufactured pressure of a situation to reveal the simple, human reality underneath.

So, how do we translate this concept to the writer’s ultimate nemesis: the fear of the blank page?

When facing a pristine, glowing white document, writers don’t usually fear the paper. They fear judgment. They fear failure. They fear that what they write won’t be smart, profound, or polished enough.

If you want to conquer the blank page, you need to strip it of its power. Here is how to apply the “underwear rule” to your writing process and finally start typing.

---

1. Realize the Page Isn’t a Masterpiece Waiting to Happen (It’s Laundry)

When a blank page feels intimidating, it’s usually because we’ve put it on a pedestal. We treat the cursor like a spotlight and the first sentence like a literary legacy.

The Translation: Strip the page of its dignity.

Accept right now that your first draft is going to be messy, awkward, and poorly fitted—much like wearing mismatched underwear on laundry day. A blank page isn’t a marble slab waiting for a Michelangelo; it’s a dumping ground for half-formed thoughts. Give yourself permission to write absolute garbage. You cannot edit a blank page, but you can fix a terribly written paragraph.

2. Picture Your Reader as a Friend (Or Just a Person)

When we write, we often imagine an intimidating, anonymous crowd reading our work with crossed arms and red pens. We write for “The Internet,” “The Critics,” or “My High School English Teacher.”

The Translation: Strip your audience of their intimidating title.

Instead of imagining a faceless mob of critics, picture one specific, friendly person. Write an email to your best friend explaining the concept. Talk to your sibling. When you shift your mental audience from “The Public” to “One Individual,” the stakes instantly lower. You stop trying to sound like a textbook and start sounding like a human being.

3. Change What You’re Wearing (Digital Disguises)

Sometimes the environment contributes to the intimidation factor. Staring at a blinking cursor in a professional, stark-white word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs feels like sitting in the principal’s office.

The Translation: Change the aesthetic.

Just like dressing down changes your confidence, changing your writing environment can strip away the pressure.

• Use a distraction-free writing app with a dark mode (like Typora, Scrivener, or Ulysses) so the page isn’t glaring at you.
• Write your first draft in Comic Sans or a goofy font—it’s scientifically impossible to take a sentence seriously when it’s written in Comic Sans, which instantly kills your inner perfectionist.
• Write the first version by hand in a cheap notebook where mistakes don’t carry the finality of a digital delete key.

4. Write the “Unpublishable” Intro

The hardest part of any journey is the first step, and the hardest part of any article or story is the first sentence. We agonize over hooks, desperately trying to start with a bang.

The Translation: Start with a terrible warm-up.

Give yourself a rule: The first three sentences are not allowed to be good. Write intentionally bad sentences to break the ice.

• “I have no idea what I’m writing about right now, but my coffee is cold.”
• “This is going to be a really stupid article about writing.”

Once you break the silence of the page—even with nonsense—the spell is broken. You’ve crossed the threshold. Now you can delete the garbage intro and get to the real work.

---

The Bottom Line

The fear of the blank page is just performance anxiety in disguise.

Just like public speaking, writing triggers our deepest insecurities about being seen and judged. But the next time you freeze up in front of a flashing cursor, remember the core lesson of the “underwear” trick: The things intimidating you only have power because you gave it to them.

Strip the page of its perfectionism. Strip the audience of their judgment. Stop waiting for the muse to show up in a three-piece suit, and start writing in your sweatpants.

…

Day 246 – Are modern novels boring?

…

Are Modern Novels Boring? (And How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss)

Scroll through Goodreads, wander the aisles of a major bookstore, or tune into BookTok, and you’ll find a paradoxical landscape. We are currently living through a golden age of publishing volume. Yet, a nagging, heresy-sounding question is echoing among avid readers, critics, and writers alike:

Are modern novels… kind of boring?

It’s a controversial take. After all, thousands of brilliantly crafted, highly praised books hit the shelves every year. So why does a pervasive sense of literary fatigue seem to have gripped the reading public? Why do so many contemporary books feel like they were written by an algorithm, polished by a focus group, and designed to be consumed like fast food rather than savoured like a fine wine?

Let’s dive into the state of contemporary fiction, explore why modern novels sometimes feel like an uninspired trudge, and discover how readers can navigate past the noise to avoid the terrifying “literary abyss.”

---

Part 1: Why Do Modern Novels Feel Boring?

To be clear, “boring” doesn’t necessarily mean slow. In fact, many modern novels move at a breakneck pace. Rather, the boredom stems from a sense of sameness, predictability, and a retreat from genuine artistic risk.

Here are the primary culprits turning contemporary fiction into a snooze-fest:

1. The Domestication of the Plot (The “Cozy” Trap)

In an effort to remain hyper-relatable and emotionally safe, a massive slice of modern literary fiction has retreated into the mundane. We are flooded with novels about contemporary people sitting in apartments, navigating micro-aggressions, having esoteric conversations about modern dating, and agonising over career pivots.

While everyday life can be profound, too many modern novels mistake triviality for depth. When every book is a quiet, low-stakes character study about upper-middle-class ennui, the genre begins to smell of stale coffee and self-absorption.

2. The Algorithmic Homogenization of Style

Publishing is a business, and businesses hate losing money. In the age of algorithmic marketing, publishing houses increasingly lean toward formulas that have worked before.

This has birthed a distinct “contemporary literary voice”: clean, hyper-accessible, emotionally explicit, and largely devoid of stylistic idiosyncrasies. Authors are often encouraged to write in a cinematic, easily translatable style that makes adaptation for Netflix or HBO effortless. Gone are the eccentric prose styles of the past; in their place is a bland, standardised English designed not to offend anyone’s palate.

3. “Show, Don’t Tell” Has Become “Explain Everything”

Good writing historically trusted the reader to read between the lines. Modern fiction, however, is terrified of ambiguity.

Influenced perhaps by the digital age’s demand for instant clarity, contemporary novels often hold the reader’s hand a little too tightly. Themes are spelled out explicitly in the dialogue. Characters give TED Talks to explain their internal psychology. When a book does all the emotional heavy lifting for you, the act of reading ceases to be a dynamic collaboration and becomes a passive lecture.

4. The Moralization of Art

Literature has always explored morality, but a growing trend in modern fiction is the demand that characters (and by extension, authors) pass strict contemporary ideological purity tests.

When novels become moral instruction manuals rather than explorations of human complexity, they lose their spark. Great literature thrives in the grey areas, the hypocrisies, and the moral ugliness of humanity. When every character has to be a pristine avatar of virtue—or an unambiguously cartoonish villain—the narrative tension evaporates.

---

Part 2: How to Spot a “Boring” Book Before You Buy

If you want to protect your reading time from the abyss of blandness, you need a radar system. Be wary of books that feature these red flags:

• The Over-caffeinated Blurb: If the back cover features quotes comparing the author to Joan Didion, Sally Rooney, and Ottessa Moshfegh all at once, you are likely looking at a manufactured trend, not an authentic voice.
• The High-Concept Gimmick: A book whose entire value proposition is a quirky premise (“What if an AI ran a coffee shop in a post-apocalyptic IKEA?”) but lacks stylistic prose or psychological depth.
• The Trauma-Drop: Books that rely on an early, shocking revelation of trauma to generate forced emotional stakes, while the rest of the prose coasts on cruise control.

---

Part 3: How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss?

If you are suffering from reading fatigue, do not give up on reading altogether. You simply need to change your navigation strategy. Here is how you can step back from the brink of the literary abyss and fall in love with reading again.

1. Read Widely Across Time

There is an entire cemetery of brilliant literature out there waiting to be exhumed. If modern fiction feels flat, step back. Read the 19th-century Russians for sheer psychological depth; read the mid-century modernists for stylistic fireworks; read genre fiction from the 1970s and 80s that prioritised pure, unadulterated storytelling.

A healthy reading diet resembles a balanced ecosystem: mix the old with the new.

2. Seek Out Small Presses and Indie Publishers

While the Big Five publishers are increasingly risk-averse, independent presses (like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, New Directions, and Europa Editions) are taking massive artistic gambles.

Indie publishers are the lifeblood of contemporary literary innovation. They are printing translations of international authors, genre-bending experiments, and unapologetic prose that traditional houses won’t touch because they aren’t “marketable enough.”

3. Embrace Translation

American and British fiction often suffer from a specific cultural insularity. By looking outward and reading translated literature, you instantly escape the stylistic homogeneity of the Anglosphere.

Writers from South Korea, Argentina, Norway, Japan, and France bring entirely different philosophical frameworks, cultural rhythms, and narrative structures to the page. Reading translated works is the literary equivalent of taking off virtual reality goggles and seeing the real world for the first time.

4. Support Books That Take Risks

When you find an author who refuses to play it safe—someone who uses weird punctuation, writes unlikeable characters, tackles bizarre subjects, or structures a plot like a labyrinth—support them. Buy their books, recommend them to friends, and let publishers know that readers still reward audacity.

---

Conclusion: The Horizon is Still Bright

Are modern novels boring? Many of them are, yes. But boredom is simply a symptom of a bloated marketplace prioritising commercial safety over artistic peril.

The literary abyss is real, but it is entirely avoidable. By raising our standards, looking beyond the bestseller lists, and championing books with teeth, grit, and originality, we can push past the noise.

Great, vital, mind-altering books are still being written—we just have to be a little braver in how we look for them.

…

Day 246 – Are modern novels boring?

…

Are Modern Novels Boring? (And How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss)

Scroll through Goodreads, wander the aisles of a major bookstore, or tune into BookTok, and you’ll find a paradoxical landscape. We are currently living through a golden age of publishing volume. Yet, a nagging, heresy-sounding question is echoing among avid readers, critics, and writers alike:

Are modern novels… kind of boring?

It’s a controversial take. After all, thousands of brilliantly crafted, highly praised books hit the shelves every year. So why does a pervasive sense of literary fatigue seem to have gripped the reading public? Why do so many contemporary books feel like they were written by an algorithm, polished by a focus group, and designed to be consumed like fast food rather than savored like a fine wine?

Let’s dive into the state of contemporary fiction, explore why modern novels sometimes feel like an uninspired trudge, and discover how readers can navigate past the noise to avoid the terrifying “literary abyss.”

---

Part 1: Why Do Modern Novels Feel Boring?

To be clear, “boring” doesn’t necessarily mean slow. In fact, many modern novels move at a breakneck pace. Rather, the boredom stems from a sense of sameness, predictability, and a retreat from genuine artistic risk.

Here are the primary culprits turning contemporary fiction into a snooze-fest:

1. The Domestication of the Plot (The “Cozy” Trap)

In an effort to remain hyper-relatable and emotionally safe, a massive slice of modern literary fiction has retreated into the mundane. We are flooded with novels about contemporary people sitting in apartments, navigating micro-aggressions, having esoteric conversations about modern dating, and agonizing over career pivots.

While everyday life can be profound, too many modern novels mistake triviality for depth. When every book is a quiet, low-stakes character study about upper-middle-class ennui, the genre begins to smell of stale coffee and self-absorption.

2. The Algorithmic Homogenization of Style

Publishing is a business, and businesses hate losing money. In the age of algorithmic marketing, publishing houses increasingly lean toward formulas that have worked before.

This has birthed a distinct “contemporary literary voice”: clean, hyper-accessible, emotionally explicit, and largely devoid of stylistic idiosyncrasies. Authors are often encouraged to write in a cinematic, easily translatable style that makes adaptation for Netflix or HBO effortless. Gone are the eccentric prose styles of the past; in their place is a bland, standardized English designed not to offend anyone’s palate.

3. “Show, Don’t Tell” Has Become “Explain Everything”

Good writing historically trusted the reader to read between the lines. Modern fiction, however, is terrified of ambiguity.

Influenced perhaps by the digital age’s demand for instant clarity, contemporary novels often hold the reader’s hand a little too tightly. Themes are spelled out explicitly in the dialogue. Characters give TED Talks to explain their internal psychology. When a book does all the emotional heavy lifting for you, the act of reading ceases to be a dynamic collaboration and becomes a passive lecture.

4. The Moralization of Art

Literature has always explored morality, but a growing trend in modern fiction is the demand that characters (and by extension, authors) pass strict contemporary ideological purity tests.

When novels become moral instruction manuals rather than explorations of human complexity, they lose their spark. Great literature thrives in the gray areas, the hypocrisies, and the moral ugliness of humanity. When every character has to be a pristine avatar of virtue—or an unambiguously cartoonish villain—the narrative tension evaporates.

---

Part 2: How to Spot a “Boring” Book Before You Buy

If you want to protect your reading time from the abyss of blandness, you need a radar system. Be wary of books that feature these red flags:

• The Over-caffeinated Blurb: If the back cover features quotes comparing the author to Joan Didion, Sally Rooney, and Ottessa Moshfegh all at once, you are likely looking at a manufactured trend, not an authentic voice.
• The High-Concept Gimmick: A book whose entire value proposition is a quirky premise (“What if an AI ran a coffee shop in a post-apocalyptic IKEA?”) but lacks stylistic prose or psychological depth.
• The Trauma-Drop: Books that rely on an early, shocking revelation of trauma to generate forced emotional stakes, while the rest of the prose coasts on cruise control.

---

Part 3: How Do We Avoid the Literary Abyss?

If you are suffering from reading fatigue, do not give up on reading altogether. You simply need to change your navigation strategy. Here is how you can step back from the brink of the literary abyss and fall in love with reading again.

1. Read Widely Across Time

There is an entire cemetery of brilliant literature out there waiting to be exhumed. If modern fiction feels flat, step back. Read the 19th-century Russians for sheer psychological depth; read the mid-century modernists for stylistic fireworks; read genre fiction from the 1970s and 80s that prioritized pure, unadulterated storytelling.

A healthy reading diet resembles a balanced ecosystem: mix the old with the new.

2. Seek Out Small Presses and Indie Publishers

While the Big Five publishers are increasingly risk-averse, independent presses (like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, New Directions, and Europa Editions) are taking massive artistic gambles.

Indie publishers are the lifeblood of contemporary literary innovation. They are printing translations of international authors, genre-bending experiments, and unapologetic prose that traditional houses won’t touch because they aren’t “marketable enough.”

3. Embrace Translation

American and British fiction often suffer from a specific cultural insularity. By looking outward and reading translated literature, you instantly escape the stylistic homogeneity of the Anglosphere.

Writers from South Korea, Argentina, Norway, Japan, and France bring entirely different philosophical frameworks, cultural rhythms, and narrative structures to the page. Reading translated works is the literary equivalent of taking off virtual reality goggles and seeing the real world for the first time.

4. Support Books That Take Risks

When you find an author who refuses to play it safe—someone who uses weird punctuation, writes unlikeable characters, tackles bizarre subjects, or structures a plot like a labyrinth—support them. Buy their books, recommend them to friends, and let publishers know that readers still reward audacity.

---

Conclusion: The Horizon is Still Bright

Are modern novels boring? Many of them are, yes. But boredom is simply a symptom of a bloated marketplace prioritizing commercial safety over artistic peril.

The literary abyss is real, but it is entirely avoidable. By raising our standards, looking beyond the bestseller lists, and championing books with teeth, grit, and originality, we can push past the noise.

Great, vital, mind-altering books are still being written—we just have to be a little braver in how we look for them.

…

Day 245 – Vivid Descriptions

…

What Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon Teaches Us About Plotting and Vivid Description

When we talk about the titans of American crime fiction, one name towers above the rest: Dashiell Hammett. Before Raymond Chandler gave us poetic metaphors, and long before modern thriller writers cluttered pages with convoluted twists, Hammett stripped the genre down to its bone and sinew.

At the centre of his legacy is The Maltese Falcon (1930). Beyond its status as the quintessential noir novel, The Maltese Falcon is a masterclass in two distinct literary arts: exemplary plotting and vivid, objective description.

If you are a writer looking to sharpen your craft, or simply a lover of brilliant storytelling, Hammett’s seminal work offers invaluable lessons. Let’s dive into the anatomy of The Maltese Falcon and explore what we can learn from the man who revolutionised modern fiction.

---

1. The Power of the Objective Eye (Vivid Description Through Action)

Many aspiring writers believe that “vivid description” means loading a paragraph with purple prose, elaborate metaphors, and sweeping adjectives. Hammett proves the exact opposite.

As a former operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Hammett wrote what he knew. His descriptions are rooted in strict realism. He doesn’t tell us how a character feels; he shows us how they move, how they dress, and how they react to their environment.

The Iconic Introduction of Sam Spade

Look at how Hammett introduces his protagonist, private investigator Sam Spade, in the opening pages:

“Spade’s blondish gray hair was cut short, made his head-top look like a rose-bush with the blossoms clipped off. Eyes-yellow-gray—were small and wary. His chin prominent and hard… He sat reading a newspaper with a hard-boiled unconcern.”

Notice what’s missing? There is no deep internal monologue explaining Spade’s moral ambiguity. Instead, Hammett uses concrete, sharp imagery—”hard,” “wary,” “blossoms clipped off”—to paint a picture that lets the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting.

What We Can Learn:

• Show, Don’t Preach: Let your characters’ physical traits and micro-actions reveal their inner psychology.
• Precision Over Poetry: Choose nouns and verbs that pack a punch. Instead of saying a room was messy, describe the exact placement of the half-empty highball glass and the unread mail.
• Behavior as Characterization: Hammett understood that in high-stakes environments, people reveal themselves through posture, tics, and glances, not soliloquies.

---

2. The Architecture of Exemplary Plotting

A common trap in genre fiction is the “plot maze”—where authors add twists just to confuse the reader, resulting in a narrative that collapses under its own weight. The Maltese Falcon avoids this by treating its plot like a piece of precision machinery. Every scene moves the ball forward, and every character has a distinct, driving motivation.

The plot kicks off when Brigid O’Shaughnessy (disguised as “Miss Wonderley”) walks into Spade’s office with a lie. From that moment, a chain reaction of greed is set in motion, drawing in a colourful rogues’ gallery: Kasper Cairo, Joel Cairo, and the ominous Kasper Gutman (the “Fat Man”).

They are all hunting the elusive, jewel-encrusted black bird. But the falcon itself is famously a MacGuffin—an object that drives the plot forward while ultimately holding no intrinsic value.

What We Can Learn:

• Character-Driven Plotting: Hammett doesn’t force his characters to do unnatural things just to make a plot twist work. The plot is an inevitable collision course driven by greedy, desperate people all chasing the same prize.
• Master the MacGuffin: Give your characters a focal point of desire, but remember that the pursuit of the object is always more interesting than the object itself. The tension comes from the shifting alliances and betrayals among the hunters.
• Tight Causality: In a well-plotted story, Scene A must lead directly to Scene B, connected by either “therefore” or “but”—never “and then.” Hammett ensures that every lie told and every body dropped has immediate consequences for Sam Spade.

---

3. The Enigma of the Protagonist (Ambiguity is Magnetic)

Traditional heroes up to that point were often clear-cut champions of good. Sam Spade shattered that mold. He is sleeping with his late partner’s wife, he is mercenary about his fees, and at the end of the novel, he turns the woman he loves (and desires) over to the police because, as he tells her, “I’m not going to play the sap for you.”

Hammett teaches us that a protagonist doesn’t need to be likable to be compelling. They need to have a code. Spade’s code isn’t about traditional morality; it’s about professional pride and survival in a corrupt world.

What We Can Learn:

• Embrace Moral Grey Areas: Flawed protagonists are infinitely more relatable and realistic than paragons of virtue.
• Define Your Character’s Code: Even if your character is a scoundrel, they must have lines they refuse to cross. This creates internal tension and reader loyalty.

---

Final Takeaway: Read Hammett Like a Blueprint

Dashiell Hammett didn’t just write pulp detective stories; he wrote literature that exposed the anxieties of modern life through the lens of crime.

By studying The Maltese Falcon, writers can learn how to strip away narrative fat. Through vivid, objective descriptions, you can ground your readers in reality, and through rigorous, cause-and-effect plotting, you can keep them turning the pages late into the night.

The falcon may have been a fake, but the lessons Dashiell Hammett left behind are the real deal.

---

Are you a fan of classic noir? What is your favorite Dashiell Hammett novel? Let us know in the comments below!

…

Day 245 – Vivid Descriptions

…

What Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon Teaches Us About Plotting and Vivid Description

When we talk about the titans of American crime fiction, one name towers above the rest: Dashiell Hammett. Before Raymond Chandler gave us poetic metaphors, and long before modern thriller writers cluttered pages with convoluted twists, Hammett stripped the genre down to its bone and sinew.

At the center of his legacy is The Maltese Falcon (1930). Beyond its status as the quintessential noir novel, The Maltese Falcon is a masterclass in two distinct literary arts: exemplary plotting and vivid, objective description.

If you are a writer looking to sharpen your craft, or simply a lover of brilliant storytelling, Hammett’s seminal work offers invaluable lessons. Let’s dive into the anatomy of The Maltese Falcon and explore what we can learn from the man who revolutionised modern fiction.

---

1. The Power of the Objective Eye (Vivid Description Through Action)

Many aspiring writers believe that “vivid description” means loading a paragraph with purple prose, elaborate metaphors, and sweeping adjectives. Hammett proves the exact opposite.

As a former operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Hammett wrote what he knew. His descriptions are rooted in strict realism. He doesn’t tell us how a character feels; he shows us how they move, how they dress, and how they react to their environment.

The Iconic Introduction of Sam Spade

Look at how Hammett introduces his protagonist, private investigator Sam Spade, in the opening pages:

“Spade’s blondish gray hair was cut short, made his head-top look like a rose-bush with the blossoms clipped off. Eyes-yellow-gray—were small and wary. His chin prominent and hard… He sat reading a newspaper with a hard-boiled unconcern.”

Notice what’s missing? There is no deep internal monologue explaining Spade’s moral ambiguity. Instead, Hammett uses concrete, sharp imagery—”hard,” “wary,” “blossoms clipped off”—to paint a picture that lets the reader’s imagination do the heavy lifting.

What We Can Learn:

• Show, Don’t Preach: Let your characters’ physical traits and micro-actions reveal their inner psychology.
• Precision Over Poetry: Choose nouns and verbs that pack a punch. Instead of saying a room was messy, describe the exact placement of the half-empty highball glass and the unread mail.
• Behavior as Characterization: Hammett understood that in high-stakes environments, people reveal themselves through posture, tics, and glances, not soliloquies.

---

2. The Architecture of Exemplary Plotting

A common trap in genre fiction is the “plot maze”—where authors add twists just to confuse the reader, resulting in a narrative that collapses under its own weight. The Maltese Falcon avoids this by treating its plot like a piece of precision machinery. Every scene moves the ball forward, and every character has a distinct, driving motivation.

The plot kicks off when Brigid O’Shaughnessy (disguised as “Miss Wonderley”) walks into Spade’s office with a lie. From that moment, a chain reaction of greed is set in motion, drawing in a colourful rogues’ gallery: Kasper Cairo, Joel Cairo, and the ominous Kasper Gutman (the “Fat Man”).

They are all hunting the elusive, jewel-encrusted black bird. But the falcon itself is famously a MacGuffin—an object that drives the plot forward while ultimately holding no intrinsic value.

What We Can Learn:

• Character-Driven Plotting: Hammett doesn’t force his characters to do unnatural things just to make a plot twist work. The plot is an inevitable collision course driven by greedy, desperate people all chasing the same prize.
• Master the MacGuffin: Give your characters a focal point of desire, but remember that the pursuit of the object is always more interesting than the object itself. The tension comes from the shifting alliances and betrayals among the hunters.
• Tight Causality: In a well-plotted story, Scene A must lead directly to Scene B, connected by either “therefore” or “but”—never “and then.” Hammett ensures that every lie told and every body dropped has immediate consequences for Sam Spade.

---

3. The Enigma of the Protagonist (Ambiguity is Magnetic)

Traditional heroes up to that point were often clear-cut champions of good. Sam Spade shattered that mold. He is sleeping with his late partner’s wife, he is mercenary about his fees, and at the end of the novel, he turns the woman he loves (and desires) over to the police because, as he tells her, “I’m not going to play the sap for you.”

Hammett teaches us that a protagonist doesn’t need to be likable to be compelling. They need to have a code. Spade’s code isn’t about traditional morality; it’s about professional pride and survival in a corrupt world.

What We Can Learn:

• Embrace Moral Grey Areas: Flawed protagonists are infinitely more relatable and realistic than paragons of virtue.
• Define Your Character’s Code: Even if your character is a scoundrel, they must have lines they refuse to cross. This creates internal tension and reader loyalty.

---

Final Takeaway: Read Hammett Like a Blueprint

Dashiell Hammett didn’t just write pulp detective stories; he wrote literature that exposed the anxieties of modern life through the lens of crime.

By studying The Maltese Falcon, writers can learn how to strip away narrative fat. Through vivid, objective descriptions, you can ground your readers in reality, and through rigorous, cause-and-effect plotting, you can keep them turning the pages late into the night.

The falcon may have been a fake, but the lessons Dashiell Hammett left behind are the real deal.

---

Are you a fan of classic noir? What is your favorite Dashiell Hammett novel? Let us know in the comments below!

…

Day 244 – Writing exercise

…

Life is a paradox.

You think that everything is great, that after all the drama, mishaps and disasters that were sent to try you were defeated, one by one, that the universe had finally decided you deserved a life together.

God knows we had been on the verge of going our separate ways more times than I could count.

But we were there.

Amelia had planned a dinner for two in the swankiest restaurant in the city, and I had just got changed at work and about to catch a cab.

Amelia was driving in from the suburbs, and we would be staying in an equally swank hotel for the weekend.

It was a plan we had made the day before our wedding, to do exactly one year after, on our first anniversary.

Today marked our fifth.

Just as I told the cabbie the address, my cell phone rang.

‘Private Number’

I was going to ignore it, but a strange sensation ran through me, the like of which I’d never felt before.

“Hello?”

“Is that Allen Jamieson?”

“Yes.”  Tentative.  A spear of pain ran through my heart, and I braced myself.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

That was the ‘Oh God’ moment, and I could feel my world slipping out from under me.

“Your wife, Amelia, has been in a serious car accident.  She has been taken to hospital.  I suggest you get there as soon as possible.”

At the word ‘accident,’ I think I stopped thinking.

He gave the address, I thanked him, and that was it.  Seconds later he tested the address, knowing that I wouldn’t remember a word he said, except that one word, ‘accident’.

…

I arrived in a daze, sick with worry, thinking that I was too late, that the light of my life had been extinguished.

After everything else …

I made myself known at the front desk, and within a minute a nurse came to take me to her. 

She was in the emergency room; just arrived, and yes, still alive but barely.  The nurse didn’t say she was hanging by a thread, but I read between the lines.

We burst into chaos.  Apparently she was not the only victim of what had been a minor earth tremor that had brought down an overpass. 

From the front counter to the ER, I got the disjointed details:  a hundred cars and five buses, most crushed, and Amelia was one of five who survived.  I did not hear how many didn’t.

I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see, and when the nurse pulled back the curtain, I simply fainted.

…

When I recovered, smelling salts were horrible, and I awoke confused.  I was outside her cubicle, but it was now empty. 

Another nurse was saying that she had been taken to the OR for emergency surgery, and in my mind I could see the bloodied and broken piece of what was, as early as that morning, a beautiful and graceful woman who had survived everything that could be thrown at her.

Now?

If she died, I had not taken the chance to tell her everything I wanted to.  In that moment, I had not been strong – the man she needed to be by her side when it mattered the most.

Now, all I could do was wait.

…

Twelve hours.

Twelve hours during which I could not sleep, could not rest, got up, walked around, sat down, conversed with other family members of other victims who were equally as stultified as I was at the horrendudness of what had happened.

The news coverage was on the whole time, covering the disaster, the death toll in the hundreds, the rescue attempts, the survivors.  I saw the car Amelia had been in, and how she survived was a miracle.

Then the news turned dark: a panel of experts dissecting the disaster, and the revelation that the contractors who built the flyover had scrimped on materials and, had it been built properly, it might not have happened.

Not helping.

Searching for someone to blame would never help the victims or the loved ones who lost them.

One by one, the family members left.  Most of their loved ones died on the operating table.  Three had not.  Relief could be measured, and it could be felt.

Twelve hours.

It was my turn.

The doctor, or one of them, came out, a white coat over bloodied scrubs.  Straight from the fires of hell.

“She is a survivor,” was the first thing he said, with just a touch of admiration in his tone.  “We repaired the body; it will heal in time with few aftereffects.  Her mind, that’s a different matter.  We repaired the damage, but we cannot be sure what functions may or may not return.  She will be herself, the woman you know.  She just may not remember who you are, or who she is.  It is usually only temporary, but…”

It was enough.  God had found a new way to tear us apart.  It was just another hurdle, one that may take a little time to get over.

And, for Amelia, I had all the time in the world

…

Five months.

Nearly half a year, and every day I sat in her room, a bright sunny aspect looking over the gardens which, even for late autumn, still looked delightful.

The external and internal injuries had recovered. Her arms healed, her legs healed, and all we could do was wait to see if her head healed.  Looking at her, except for a few scars, she looked the same Amelia as she had before the accident.

I came in, sat down, said my piece about everything going on around us, and then read from the classics.  Sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek or Italian or Latin.

I told her all about Latin and the fact it was not a dead language.   She would have agreed with me.  If we wanted to say something and not have people around us understand, we’d speak in Latin.

It was about three in the afternoon. 

Birds were tweeting outside.  The sky had filled with dark, ominous clouds, and there were streaks of lightning in the distance.

A storm was coming.

Fifteen minutes later it was on us.  A bolt of lightning lit up the room, and then the crack of thunder, directly overhead.

I was holding her hand.

Just after the crack of thunder, she squeezed my hand and opened her eyes.

I could see fear in her eyes, but I had not known her to be scared of thunder.

She spoke, but nothing came out.  She coughed and winced.  Not completely healed.

Then, “Where am I?” 

She realised I was holding her hand and slipped it out of my grip.  Not a good sign.

“A convalescent hospital “

“Why?

“You were in an accident.”

“When?”

“Five months ago.  You have been in a coma.”

“And you are?”

There it was.  What I had been dreading for the past five months, the cruellest of outcomes.  She would not remember who I was.

“Your husband Allen.”

“You could be anybody.”

“I could, but I have proof.”  Sitting beside the bed was a photograph album.  Started at our wedding, the one none of her relatives came to.

The people who had spent two years trying to stop her from marrying me.  Her family had different plans for her, but she had not wanted that life.

Cinderella’s life was normal compared to what her family had put her through, including kidnapping, mind control, torture by any other name, and a life-and-death rescue.

No one believed the story, but every word of it was true.  I still carried the scars and the bullet they had hoped would kill me.  It probably would in time.

She dragged herself up into a sitting position, and I gave her the album.  She leafed through the pages, taking the time to look at the photos and then at me.

At the end, she closed the album and let it rest on her knees.

“I don’t remember anything.  Not yours, not my life, nothing.”  Tears flowed.

The doctor came in; I had seen him outside waiting, perhaps to see if I had any effect on what he still maintained would be temporary amnesia.

He looked at me, and I nodded.  If I thought the last five months had been hard, the next were going to be harder.

…

It took another two months to get her back to a semblance of her former self. Intensive therapy to get all her limbs working, eating, coping with all those normal things we take for granted.

She had lost weight, and the clothes I brought, her favourites, were too large, and according to her, ‘what person in their right mind would wear these?’

She wanted jeans and T-shirts, and sports shoes.  What some might call the grungy teenager look.  The thing is, she looked great in them.

What else had changed? Her attitude.  Not towards me; she seemed to have settled the debate that I was someone of interest, but that element of smoothness she’d acquired from her parents was gone, replaced by a girl who wasn’t afraid to say ‘fuck you’ if you annoyed her.

She was feisty before; now she was fiestier, which would have come in handy a long time ago.

A final week of tests and instructions to ease her way back into life outside the hospital, virtually the only place she could remember. 

Then I took her home.

Her eyes lit up when she saw the house, and I had hoped she would remember, but she didn’t.  For some reason, she said it was like the house she always wanted to live in, but couldn’t say why.

I wanted to tell her she designed it, but I promised myself I wasn’t going to shove true facts down her throat so she’d remember.  Her memory, if it returned, would be when she wanted it to.

She cleaned out her old life.  We went shopping to accommodate her new look.  We changed furniture, repainted walls, drank red wine, which before she never would, and ate Chinese.

This was someone I didn’t know.

We slept in different rooms.  I could appreciate her reluctance and probably would have worried if she jumped into bed with what was, to her, a complete stranger.  I think it had worried her from the outset that I might enforce conjugal rights, but that was the last thing on my mind.

Sex had never been her top priority, and not very often.  She hated being naked in the light, and rarely exposed much of her body except when home.  And then, she had a very conservative one-piece swimsuit.

I had thought it odd that she was hiding scars or worse, but it was just a thing with her.  It had not changed in the new Amelia.

But we coexisted; she had no interest in going anywhere or seeing anyone.  She wouldn’t remember them anyway.

…

She didn’t remember her family, the heinous brother who had caused her so much pain, the younger sister who was spoilt and treated her badly, and the father whom I suspected had been the cruellest of the three.

Her mother had killed herself to get away from them.  She had tried to leave, but had been dragged back.  Amelia had never forgiven them for that.

Amelia herself had tried to escape, and was also dragged back, and ‘taught a lesson’ by her brother.  She had never told me what happened, but I assumed it was bad.

Their cruelty increased exponentially when she wanted to marry me; her family fought it, and the sister tried to kill me the first time at the wedding rehearsal.

We escaped; Amelia had her story splattered across the pages of a mass-circulation newspaper, which led to the arrests of her father and brother, charges laid, followed by what could only be described as a mock trial, where the judge allowed a restraining order against them, a committee service for the rest.

No justice had been served that day, except that, at last, they kept their distance, even though they kept up the harassment in other ways. They had not managed to get access after the accident, even when they tried to get a court order to have her returned to their home.

I knew they would be waiting in the wings somewhere, to take the opportunity to snatch her back.  If they did, then it would be at our property, which, unbeknownst to them, was a veritable fortress.

It was a subject for discussion a few days after our arrival, and it was settled.

“I know I have brought up the subject before, but you do have a family.  The thing is, they hurt you in several ways, and you had to get a restraining order to keep them away.”

“That bad.”

“Worse.  You never told me what they did to you, not that I wanted to know, but they’re out there, and given your current circumstances, they might come after you.  They never approved of me as your husband.”

“What did you do?”

An odd question, but logical considering her condition.

“To them, I was a lower-class slob, beneath your station in life.  You didn’t think so, which set them all off.  They fought the relationship, tried to stop the wedding, your sister tried to kill me.  The list is endless.”

“Then thank God I don’t remember them.”

Thank God indeed.

Until…

Later that day, my cell phone rang, an unlisted number.

I answered it.

It was her brother.

“How did you get this number?”  It was meant to be a burner phone.

“That’s irrelevant.  We would like to see my sister.”

“You have a restraining order.”

I was waiting to hear his laughter and tell me the error of my interpretation of such matters.  Restraining orders did not apply to the Magallans.

“You can invite us to visit.  Brief, supervised.  What harm could it do if she doesn’t remember us?  Or are you afraid she might want to come with us?”

There was an element of truth to that supposition.  If she couldn’t remember them, and they were nice to her, throwing money around like paper confetti, she might.

Seeing them again might jog her memory too. Though a shock as severe as that might have adverse effects on her recovery.

“I suggest you give up this obsession you have.  She didn’t like you before, and I doubt that’s changed.”

“Except she had no memory of us, unless that’s just a lie.  We’ll see you tomorrow morning.”  He disconnected the call before I could reply.

When I told her later, she simply said, “Let them come.  I will deal with them.”

“You remember them?”

“No.  If they are as bad as you say they are, it’s no wonder my memory doesn’t want to return.   The doctor said that a possible reason for this amnesia is because my mind is shutting out the pain it knows will return if I get my memory back.”

“It might be because of me too.”

“I don’t feel that you hurt me, only protected me.  I have this strange feeling of contentment when I am with you.  It’s the reason I’m here now.  I would not have come with you otherwise.”

“And I will continue to protect you.  I told them not to come.  You have a restraining order against them.  I could call the police.”

“No.  I want to see them, see what they have to say for themselves.”

I shrugged.  There was a gun in the case for just such emergencies. I hope I wouldn’t have to use it.

…

We lived on what used to be cattle grazing land, a hundred acres stretching from the coastline to the main road.  Our house was back nearer the ocean, where it couldn’t be seen from the main road.

There were cameras and a high fence, so visitors had to identify themselves before entering.  There were surveillance cameras everywhere, so they couldn’t arrive unannounced.

There were only two ways to get to the house.  By the lane off the main road and through the front gate, and from the ocean.  If you liked scaling cliffs.

They came via the front gate.

We were both in the kichen when the when the button was pressed.  They had to ask us to open the gate.

There were four people in the car.  A chauffeur, the borrower in the front seat, and the father and sister in the back.  None of them looked comfortable.

The chauffeur, not suspecting we could see them, asked for permission to enter.

I gave Amelia one last chance to say no.  She did not

I opened the gate.

We watched the car come along the track, the house being about a mile back from the main road, and completely secluded on all four sides.

We watched the car slowly drive along, getting closer and closer until it stopped next to my old battered Land Rover.

I was glancing at Amelia as she closely looked at each of them as the chauffeur opened the doors and each one got out, smoothing down the invisible wrinkles and waiting for the next.

A clear view of the chauffeur.  A man who looked more like a battle-hardened mercenary than a driver.  A red flag. Amelia’s expression didn’t change.

Once standing together, the son pulled out a cigarette, but before he could light it, his father yanked out of his mouth and threw it away, adding a few choice words that made lip reading easy.

No love lost between the two of them.  The sister shook her head and started walking towards the door.  The other two caught up.

“Don’t like them,” she said.  “I don’t see how any of them could be my family, except by looks.”

“They once told me they weren’t in the business of being liked.”  First time, and nearly the last time I met them.

“I’ll wait in here, give myself time to screw my courage to the sticking point.”

It was a phrase she had used a lot, when she was herself.  Had seeing them jog a memory fragment?

A minute later there was pounding on the door.  They’d completely overlooked using the button to ring the bell.  Were they making a statement, or being the usual bullies?

I sucked several deep breaths, then answered the door.

Richard barked, “Where is the bitch.  She’s faking it, you know.”

I stood back a foot after the verbal onslaught.

“It is usual to say hello before ranting, Richard, but then no one taught you any manners.”

“Just get out of the way.”

I thought about hitting him, but then there were two more waves of shock troops to fend off.  I stood to the side, and he pushed his way past, almost knocking me over, while saying, “Where is she?”

Maybe not such a good idea to invite them.

The father and Elizabeth passed more sedately, but with scowls on their faces.  It was clear they were not here with love in their hearts.

“I hope you left the kitchen knife set back home,” I muttered as she went past.

She simply smiled briefly, with an evil glint in her eyes, and kept going.

As I shut the door, I heard the father say, “What the hell…”

When I entered the room, I did not know what to expect.  It wasn’t Richard squirming on the floor making strange noises.

Amelia was leaning against the dividing bench between the kitchen and the dining lounge, watching him and the others.

Just watching.

The father yelled, “What happened?”  He was glaring furiously at his other daughter, Amelia.

“This person, whoever he is, came straight at me, and, of course, I had to defend myself.”  She looked straight at her father, or perhaps through him.  “Who is he, because I don’t have any animal friends that I know at that isn’t a man, its some rabid, out of control creature who should be put down.”

It was delivered almost as a conversational piece, far more frightening than if she screamed it at him like a banshee.  It virtually stopped him in his tracks

“He is your older brother.”

“No.  He isn’t.  If I had a brother, he’d be more like me.  Pleasant, docile, amenable.  That creature,” she pointed at him, still writhing, “needs to be put down.”

Her sister sighed.  “We are your family, Amelia, and we’ve come to take you home, where you belong.”

Amelia turned her eyes to her sister.  The look on her face, I noticed, was hard, the sort people would say, if looks could kill.

“Who are you again?”

“Your younger sister, Patricia.”

Amelia smiled, humourless as she evaluated the woman before her.

“Impossible.  Oversized ears, beady eyes, thin cruel lips, too much blusher, too bright red lipstick.  You look like a cadaver from a Frankenstein movie.  You’re nothing like me, so I don’t know who you are, and quite frankly, I don’t want to.”

“Don’t talk to your sister like that.”  Her father finally found his voice and had dragged the hapless son off the floor. 

I had no idea what Amelia had done to him, but it was clear he couldn’t stand up straight.

“Are you the sire of these creatures?  Then you cannot be any better than they are.  I have no idea why my husband thought I should meet you; in fact, if I remember rightly, just before you turned up at the front gate, he told me he didn’t, and the creature invited himself.  The creature also said that I was faking my amnesia.  About what you’d expect from a brainless creature.  Now…”

She leaned back over the counter, picked something, and a few seconds later had a gun in her hand.  The gun we kept in case of emergencies.

Something told me some part of her memory had returned.

“What are you doing?”  Patricia looked terrified.  Perhaps she too thought her sister’s memory had returned.

“You’re leaving my house.  Dead or alive, it’s your choice.  You have until I count to ten.  Be very grateful it’s not three.  One.”

“Let’s go,” Patricia said.  “She’s clearly off her rocker.”

“This is ridiculous,” Richard muttered.  “She’s not going to shoot anyone.”  He took a step towards her, and she shot him; the force of the bullet pushed him back into her father and sent them both sprawling.  She had aimed for the soft part of the shoulder.

This was not the Amelia I knew.

Richard screamed; realising it was not fatal, just agonising, he separated himself from his father, who scrambled to his feet, and backed away.

“This was a mistake.  A big mistake.  She has no idea who she is.”  He looked at me.  “You’ll be next; she’s clearly lost the plot.

She took a step forward and aimed the gun at his head.  “Get up and get out.  The next shot will end that pathetic life of yours, and these two as well.  It’s a three-for-one deal.”

He didn’t need to be asked twice, awkwardly himself to his feet, groaning, then clutching at the wound.  Blood stained a very expensive suit.

A last glare at Amelia, he went to say something, perhaps a threat, perhaps a curse, but thought the better of it.

They left.

Amelia followed them to the door.

“This is your one and only warning.  I ever see any of you again, I will kill you. Very slowly and very painfully.  Payback will be a bitch.”

That’s when they stopped in their tracks.  Richard turned, then the other two.

“You remember?”

“The moment you walked into the room.  What you did to me, I’ll never forget.  Neither will you, because today is the first you, all of you, better start looking over your shoulder.  You’re getting a day’s grace, then I’m coming after you, and I won’t stop until you’re dead.  Now get off my property.”

Richard lingered.  A bad mistake.  She shot at Richard, scrambling for cover until there were no more bullets.  Then, when he thought it was safe, she held up a new clip and rammed it home.

“You want to play games, Richie?”

I think he finally realised she was not joking.

They got in the car and left.

…

We waited until the car disappeared out of sight.

She sighed.  “Jesus’s, that felt good.”

“Not remembering what he did to you.”

“All of them.  No.  But I wanted to kill him.  I had to really restrain myself, but it was too easy.  He’s going to die slowly and painfully.”

“Don’t you think you’ve made your point?”  I’m as much for revenge as the next guy, but there had to be a better way.

“I did the lawyer thing, and they made a mockery out of it.  We give them a week, and then we’ll go after them.”

“A week?”

“They’ll get their security team together, send a couple of scouts, and then decide what to do.  The driver was one of their mercenaries; he was scoping the place for weaknesses.  They’ll come by the cliffs.  A week.  A half dozen of their best mercenaries found dead; they’ll get the message.”

She turned around and smiled.  “You were the only one I could trust.  Through thick and thin.”

“I believed you’d lost your memory “

“I had.  Richard tipped it all on its head.  The voice, then the presence.  What he did to me.  It all came back.  He came at me; I put him down.  Self-defence, and gun club.  Training.  I was always going to get them.  Are you in?”

“Do I get the shoot your sister?”

“After what she did to you, who am I to stop you?  Come.  Your training starts now.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2026