Red, Part Six - ...and found it diminished

Yelena was one of those beautiful women who seem to walk with a slight but visible hunch. Shoulders kept high as though to ward off the gaze of all the men who pass.

She was a treat to look at however. Long blonde hair with misty blue eyes. Tall, but not too tall, with a figure that filled me with longing whenever she walked in front of me. The fact that she pushed all my sexual desire buttons should have been a warning.

The city itself was built on many islands with a huge number of bridges connecting them. The buildings were a complex mixture of baroque and neoclassical, their empty cleanliness reminiscent of a painting by de Chirico. The effect was diminished by the huge, out of context, skyscraper stabbing the sky in the city's downtown.

It wasn't until we were in some large, chilly square surrounded on all sides by impressive Romanesque buildings that I made a move on the, until then silent, Yelena.

"Why do you hide yourself in this polished mausoleum? A girl as beautiful as you could do well elsewhere."

She finally turned to look at me, her perfect face as empty as a reflection in a soapbubble.

"I like it here. It's where I belong. It's where I was born."

"We all feel that when young. Then we grow up and begin to desire the exotic."

"You and your kind do. We wish only for stability."

Then I realised, later than I should, that the lovely Yelena was a puppet.

How many generations of selective breeding, how much training, were required to produce a puppet as nearly perfect as Yelena I don't know. I will admit that on understanding what she was my heart leapt. All human men experiment with female puppets. It's one of the perks of being human. Most grow out of it, however, as they realise the greater joys of human women. When one can have a willing partner at any time the attractions of having to make an effort to find a one become great.

All men, even those attracted to other men, can fall into treating sex as a form of masturbation, a fact true even with those we love the most. Sex with puppets makes that tendency all the greater, the puppet being totally focused on its masters pleasure.

The saying is, "Real men don't use puppets. All men do."

I used Yelena that night, that milkily blank expression never changing although her eyes, at times, became hard and opaque as I experimented in treating her as I would a human woman.

It was late when I was done and, through that feeling of exhausted satiation, I measured my image of myself and found it diminished.

Depression

your thoughts – clemmed, treacle slow, laden with seams of pit shaft dark – tread an endless groove, blinkered as a pit prop pony moithered by light your mind – dimmed, dunnock shy, cradled with songs of wind swept moors – dreams a fearless path clinkered as a wind squall diamond mantled with night your self – numbed, fossil still, layered with seals of sun starved gold – furls a nubless cloth crinkled as a sun coaxed rock rose ambered in time. by Helen Overell

Ley Lines #1

The concept of "ley lines" is generally thought of in relation to Alfred Watkins, but the stimulus and background for the concept is attributed to the English astronomer Norman Lockyer . [3] [4] [5] On 30 June 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire , and went riding a horse near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine , when he noted that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. [6] He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash", he later told his son. [7] It has been suggested that Watkin's experience stemmed from faint memories of an account in September 1870 by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford titled Boundaries and Landmarks , in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". [8] Watkins believed that, in ancie

Extinct Promotion

My story "Connect" was published last year in the anthology "Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever," edited by the formidable Phoenix Sullivan. On Tuesday, January 31, you can download the entire anthology Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever free from the Kindle store. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, you can download each of the 18 single stories for free, including my story, Connect . By any reasonable measure we are dead. Unity -- slow, cold and broken -- is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories. Of being alive, of dying, of being dead. Other authors in the anthology are participating in this promotion: Chrystalla Thoma: "The Angel Genome" Peter Dudley: "Distractions" Shona Snowden: "Blood Fruit" Scott Thomas Smith: "In Ring" Jo Antareau: "My Own

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