I can't believe I'm actually doing this.

Because I love you all. Have a special festive story. Written on the day becase white wine does that to me.

"Christmas"
The phone rings, and I drag myself from sleep to pick it up, but the line goes dead before I have a chance to speak. It's been happening more often recently, but I try not to let it get to me. After all, it is Christmas, depite a decided lack of peace on earth.
The power goes out with a descending whine, leaving the morning toast untoasted and me in the murky grey of early-morning light. I sigh theatrically, enjoying the sense of exaggerated misfortune, and shuffle into the living-room with my mobile in hand. I'll call the girlfriend, I think perhaps she'll have made up her mind by-.
"Hello?" the soft, familiar voice asks before I'm ready, and
"Hi", I say tentatively "I was wondering if you'd thought at all about what I said on-"
"Who is it, Fliss?" a sleep-muddied man's tone inquires in the background. The receiver is partially covered by a hand, but not enough to block the sound: "my ex; I'm not sure what he wants,". The sound returns, unmuffled: "What is it you-" she begins to ask, but my fury stops the words at her abstracted lips. "'Ex'? I thought you said you'd think about it - you were going to try to make things work, you said."
"You didn't phone. I assumed that you-"
"You assumed."
"Look, I'm sorry. It was an easy mistake to make. It's over, and I-"
"A mistake. This was all a mistake?"
"It's not just about you, you know - I've b-"
I thumb the line closed and drop the phone. Its rings again, and I ignore it as a hole of confusion and anger and loss opens up somewhere in my colon. I stumble to the kitchen, drink milk from the carton in the darkened fridge door. Out the window, I can see that none of the other houses have lost power, and a small child playing with a tatty football is playing on my yellowed front lawn. He kicks. I see a look of malign, impish glee on the face of the boy before his ball crashes through the windowpane and fills the sink with shards. Unbelievably, the creature has not fled, but is standing closer than ever to the broken window, and laughing uproariously at my misfortune and paisley dressing gown. I try to remember whether or not Schadenfreude was one of Santa's little elves.
Instead, I remember how much I hate this place. The mindless acceptance of norms debunked centuries ago, the blinkered horizons and moronic habits, the idealisation of the Golden Mean and Good Fucking Taste. It was no wonder that we never fitted in here.
It always seemed bizarre to me that we select our neighbours by chance and property values rather than inclination and interest.
Enough of this. I drag myself upstairs, realising that a calming cup of tea is an impossibility. The act of dressing, normally mildly enjoyable as a refutation of the provincial shirt-and-slacks norm, becomes a trial - my favourite T-shirt has been taken my person or persons unknown who are almost certainly Felicity.

The shops are rather like Everest, I postulate, turning up my collar at the freezing damp winds that don't hint of snow at all. Not in that they're freezing, uninhabitable, can only be accessed at certain times, and are quite possibly the home to huge and violent beasts of legend, more that the only reason I'm attempting to reach them is that they're there. When I arrive, the Village Store is all I'd expected and more - a wasteland of striplit avenues filled with tinsel and unappetising "organic" foodstuffs. I briefly wonder what inorganic milk would be like, before the raddled woman behind the counter gives me a gimlet stare and
"We're closed," she says.
"But you just served that young man before me"
"Yes. I did. And now we're closed."
I don't bother sighing, and leave, head down. This causes problems outside the shop, where a rogue foot sends me to the damp gravel. Except it isn't a rogue foot. It belongs to the aforementioned young man, who has a lovely shaven head, lovely dirty parka, and, as my ribs soon discover, lovely steel toecaps. He also has some wonderful friends, who entertain me with their witty repartee about "Your sort" for a good ten minutes, before they get too cold and bored to continue kicking.
I only sustain minor bruising and lose a couple of fillings. It's the journey home that's the worst. There's something about the sight of people intentionally swerving towards you through puddles that's inexplicably depressing.
I spend the rest of the day shopping elsewhere, and dropping it off where it will be most appreciated.
On Christmas Eve, the whole community will be down at the church for some festive mince pies and mulled wine. It's Traditional, and Brings People Together. Apparently, this is a good thing. I arrive late, two minutes to midnight. It is freezing outside. Inside it is warm and light and the lot of them are no doubt solving all the world's problems by now.
I walk in, and all eyes follow. I stand by the Nativity scene, under which I left my shopping earlier. I pour the contents of a bottle from my pocket over my head and look about me. Not a shred of compassion or concern.
The clock strikes.
I light the match
"Merry Christmas"

Merry Christmas you Rat Bastards.

Yeah. Have a good day. I hope everyone gets lots of nice presents and things, and eats good food and consumes large quantities of alcobooze.

Love, kittens and small sharp* objects from,

-Thaddeus "Shut the fuck up." Glands.

P.S. I want photos of everyone that writes here. I have a vague, half-formed idea for a.. thing. Sort of artsy. Photos should be manipulated in some way like the photos in mine and Withiel's profiles, but unique. Or I can do that myself if you want.

*but festively decorated.

I am feeling fat and sassy.

Awesomeface.

Best. Advert. For anything. Ever.

That's great. I'm watching it over and over. My favourites are probably Tony Robinson's "SSSSSSSSSSSSSHIT" and Jimmy Carr's "See you next Tuesday?"

Fantastic.

(Apologies if you've seen this before. But watch it again, just for kicks!)

Delirium

More short storyage. If you've ever created something you loathed, this is for you.

I screamed as I clawed out of the dream's loathsome grasp. The sickly yellow glow of the streetlight shambled its way into the room as I crawled out of bed, my flesh creeping with the lingering horrors that still haunted me, assaulting my every sense, defying my ideals of everything that was true, just, pure and right. They were still there, the screaming, writhing shapes, chimeric and dreadful, reaching out of the darkness, consuming everything. They were still there, in the darkness behind the eyes where worlds collide.

I took a faltering step toward the desk, desperate to remain where I was, to try and find solace in the blissful oblivion of a dreamless sleep, yet compelled by an unseen force to continue, unwilling yet powerless.

I sat down and took the pencil and paper, the result of a frustrating and unsuccessful night's sketching. On a clean sheet, I began to draw. Furiously, expeditiously, I drew; rough, Ill-formed shapes at first, mere suggestions of their true, terrible forms. Slowly, they began to take on detail, and a further dimension. Even as I drew, they grew of their own volition, expanding, becoming more than just two-dimensional accretions of my liquid, swirling terror.

I froze, looking down in terror of what I had done. In a rush of frantic hope, I grabbed a cigarette lighter and set the hellish sheet ablaze and threw it in a trashcan. With trembling hand, I put a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. Suddenly as the cigarette's red glow materialised in the darkness, flames rushed up out of the bin consuming the atmosphere, leaving a haze of ashen, choking mist. A high-pitched shriek filled the room, teeming with hate, fear and loathing. I knew then that there was nothing that I could do. I knew that it was all over, and that it would be me that ended it.

I grabbed a bottle of whiskey off the desk and took a big pull on it. As the fire slid down my throat I hurled it at the wall, and, delirious with fear, remorse and disbelief, I kicked the trashcan at the shards of broken glass. The horrific flames caught on the liquid and began to burn even brighter.

The fire spread.

The cigarette dropped from my lips as the flames closed in on me, and the writhing, soulless umbra consumed me.

The last thing I heard was the screams. My God, the screams...

-T

Dream-Writing

The Cat was the most attractive man in the world. For most, merely the fact that it was his maniac and cryptic antics that had driven back the unspeakable Officials would bend any knee or open any pair of legs. For the rest, a significant minority, his dashing-dishevelled good looks, impeccable hair and tousled clothing would tip the balance in his favour.
He was stunning; the archetypal gentleman adventurer: the stuff heroes are made of. He never seemed to age, and returned from each new soirée with death renewed. Even the men whose natures prevented them from participating in the hero's wild frolics, and whose wives looked longingly after him, forbore from thoughts of vengeance.

So it was all the more surprising when the Black Smith Cantram delivered an unexpected and lethal hammer-blow to the back of the Cat's unprotected neck, and boiled his body for five days and seven nights in the great natural cauldron of the rocky innter sides of the rotund and portentous Darkling Hills. The sky went black for a month, and the groves of baobab grew indigo from thenceforth.

The uniformly bearded and pugnacious tribes of the Shoreline took this as a portent of forthcoming peace, and threw themselves into a series of sanguine slaughters in order to cheat fate, resulting in the loss of a third of their number in five years. Amongst these warriors was Smorigan the Grin. Originally, his name had signified his manic warjoy, but of late, unending murder had grated on his mind, and spots of rust had gathered quietly on his great breastplate. One night of revels, his brothers took the sleeping man in his armour and painted a grin upon his body in the blue that does not wash away. Smorigan awoke to find his namesake restored to bitter irony. The shame biting at his ears he fled sunwards, along the shore.

It had been that a tribe of Hierophantii passed from the lands of the Centre and their twisted canals, and built a temple-tent upon the Shoreline out of driftwood and wave-smoothed glass. For a long while, it squatted beneath the burnished sky, while inside the people slowly turned inwards so that death would touch and caress them, but never embrace fully. There, by the sea. they cooked foul things stirred up by the storms, washed ashore bloated and white at night.

To this place Smorigan came, wounded and winded and looking for peace. There was smoke on the tent, rising upward silently smooth, and inside, silence. He sat upon a chair and they did not whisper to him before he saw them, which was somehow the worst part. He ate of their corruption, and sat, while his belly inflated like carrion and his hair fell from his head with a susurrus.
The days drifted overhead unnoticed until five years and seven days had passed. Then the cave of brown darkness was split by gold, and the shadows curled back to the edges of the room for a while. The Black Smith Cantram stood amongst the pots of foulness and reached out for the besmirched and dead-fish-eyed Smorigan.
His standing up alone was an heroic feat, for his legs were weak and his armour heavy. Only then did he take the hand of that bright killer and black creator. In his right hand, the Smith helf the Cat. He had boiled the man down to his essence all those years before, and of gold and steel he had made a forging. From this forging came the sword; a long-hilted wonder, whose huge and heavy pommel was inscribed with the words "The Cat Reborn" in all languages, and whose blade was an illuminated cloud at sunset.
The essence of the hero gone bore them aloft above the places of twisted tunnels and into the sky. The wind rushed. This is not the end

[This is an open-source fragment. It is designed for people to write around and continue, as long as they credit me and include the original piece. If anyone does this, I'd love to see it - contact me at (my name)@gmail.com. I will make more of these]

This is a nasty little thing.

Even I don't like it. But I think it's new, and interestingly horrible. So here it goes.
Don't say you weren't warned.

"Sweetheart"
Once (or perhaps twice), there was a young girl. She lived in a village, on a moor, below a mountain that loomed and skeered down from the sky; a hard rain perpetually falling. For a long while she was alone, and worked the fields in sullen domesticity with the women and the other animals (for such was the nature of the time). In this village, there was a young man. In fact, there were many young men, but the rest were hardly worth mentioning, either for reasons of inbreeding or merely unpronouncability. This one-among-many-young-men-man passed by the fields by chance, and all of a sudden he caught the girl's eye. (In fact, he had caught her mother's eye a good month earlier, but that was more the result of an accident in childhood with a poker, the high cost of glass, and her husband's energetic misuse of the vacated socket on stormy nights)

They looked at each other, and it was the suddenness of unexpected warmth in winter, the synchonicity of the rings left by glasses upon a table forming ourobouros

Predictably, a shy courtship ensued: a dance of innocence with lust in them both, producing a bond of forseen nostalgia that was almost visible on clear summer evenings. There seemed to be a limitless supply of those at the time.

Above the village stood the mountain, although it looked as though it was always falling because of the prevailing winds and such. Precisely a third of the way up, there was a cave, and in this cave there lived a giant. He hadn't always been a giant, or at least, only figuratively, but collective misunderstanding had made him so. Even his name was uncertain, although he was pretty sure it had started with a "V".
One day (for there was only one left), the giant awoke filled with maroon and nameless desire, and climbed down the mountain to the village. The people screamed and ran as they had been taught in their first year at school, and hid in their cellars. Apart from one of the elders, who was far too busy thrusting a hairbrush into his rectum to notice a hige and knotted hand reach through his window. However, from the sounds he made when the beastly thing bit into his shoulder with long, straight, white teeth, the old man worked it out soon enough.
The young man had not found his sweetheart in the panic, and so he looked in the church instead. Finding no-one, he squatted, obedient, under a pew. He was disturrbed by cries familiar from his deepest of dreams, and ran outside (into the graveyard), only to discover that his lover was in the grasp of an improbably-sized and murderous man-shaped creature rather than the throes of passion. The giant took the young girl to his cave, and therein he forced his flesh upon her, into her, and left her broken and bleeding on the mountainside.
For the man to find, wielding the expected sword, and all the while the blood covering her legs and the ground like a sheet. Assuming her death, he paused not, stepping over the body that was his love, and entered the cave to do battle.
The giant allowed him to stab it, and then as the man desperately assayed to pull the blade free, the creature delicately bit off his hands, an ape peeling a grape with its lips. Almost bravely, he beat at the thing with bleeding stumps, butted at it with his head, before the creature twisted his neck and jaw separate with finger and thumb. It tossed him out onto the grey slopes under the black sky, and he landed by his love, and their remains were commingled while the best slept, sated.

I'm going to come to your house and cut you.

Okay, I'm interested. And not just in developing an economically feasible chocolate teapot either. No, I'm interested in readers! And comments!

You see, I'm sort of wondering how many readers we have here. Also, I like comments and think they should happen more often here. Therefore, I've decided to combine them in a wild orgy of good thinking, much like a cheap prostitute and a dirty old man!

So, what I'm asking is this; add a comment to this article! That's directed at everyone who is reading this right now, including people who write here! That way, I'll have an idea of how insignificant we are. If you don't have a blogger account, get one! And then use it to write things and tell us about it so that we can look at those things. It will be great.

To show just how totally awesome this idea is, I'm going to add a comment of my very own! Hah!

-T