Will Tudge
Stories (22/0)
The Confidant
The storm had brought down several trees in the village, including one of the old oaks that Samantha Rose particularly loved. As she surveyed the bits of broken tile and twigs that littered her garden path, she found herself thinking of the tornado in the Wizard of Oz, and how unfair it was that in the real world weather didn’t sweep people away to colourful lands and adventure. After all, she could hardly be blamed if a tornado was responsible for changing her life, could she? She had risen early, and was savouring the time to herself before she had to face another day. Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of movement from upstairs, and mechanically, she turned to put the kettle on.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Fiction
Dealing with Shock
Shock. You hear a lot about it, perhaps enough to desensitise you to the full import of what it is. It’s possible that we use it inappropriate senses, when really we mean ‘very surprised’: “when I heard of David Bowie’s death, I was in shock…” Most of us know that a person receiving bad or traumatic news may act in ways that we don’t understand, and some of us forgive those ways, or at least don’t take them at face value, because we are cognisant of the concept of shock. It’s something perhaps that we instinctively know the shape of without having personally ever experienced. It seems that shock to some extent may be a phenomenon that is necessarily a unique experience, being as it is the result of an individual’s response to stimuli (especially traumatic stimuli). This piece is part of my own response to shock, and my hope is twofold: that putting a random collection of my thoughts in writing will help me in the immediate aftermath, and that maybe something I say here will strike a chord with someone and provide a measure of solace or help to them in the wake of an undesirable event in their life.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Journal
Finders Keepers Finders Weepers
I wouldn’t exactly say there’s an art to this, but there’s definitely a process. What you’re looking for, first and foremost is someone unlikely to be carrying a weapon, or anything that could be used as one. Next up is how much money they’re likely to have. Can’t always tell, but chances are good that if they look like they’re worth knocking over, they are. Make sure you know the area, any rat runs and exits, especially ones you can’t get a car down and avoid anywhere busy: any street with lots of people is gonna have at least one who can see tomorrow’s headline being ‘Local hero thwarts mugger.’ After that it’s all up to whether you’ve got the balls to go through with it. For me, not an issue. It won’t win me many friends, but I like it. When someone’s in front of you, especially someone who thinks they’re better than you, but you know that you’re prepared to go that much further than them because they’re soft and weak and you’re not, it’s a good feeling. It must be how those big balls CEOs feel all the time. It doesn’t matter that they fancy themselves and think they’re a bit tasty. It doesn’t matter what they’ve always thought they would do in this situation. From the moment I step out in front of them, I’m in total control. Some boxer once said: “everyone’s got a plan until they get hit in the face.” He’d be good at this, whoever he was.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Fiction
In love and falling
Just…one…more…step… Oh wow, it’s true! I’d heard about this, but I didn’t think it was a real thing! I can’t be more than three years old here, I haven’t thought about this in years. My older brother has something, I don’t know what it is, but I want it, he makes me want it, and I want it so badly that my breath begins to catch in my throat and I can feel my eyes beginning to sting but before I can cry he holds out his hands in a conciliatory manner and says he’ll let me have the thing if I give him my share of the sweets mum bought us and I instantly agree and as he takes the sweets and runs off laughing, stuffing them into his mouth, he drops something on the floor, I can see that all he had, the thing that I had wanted so desperately, was one of my own crayons and then the tears do come, loudly and freely.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Fiction
Anne Thomas
Ernest and Anne Thomas had been happily married for six years, and as the old joke goes, unhappily married for a further thirty. The union had been blessed with three children, two boys and a girl, who in time grew up to be responsible adults with good prospects. When the youngest of the children left home for good, Anne promptly divorced her husband and set about enjoying the rest of her life. Her first task as a divorcee, she found, was to explain why she had split from her partner of the best part of half a century.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Fiction
Hal and Diane
There was this one bar, real dive, middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert and not much else, the kinda joint where big men with beards, bikes and facial tattoos can be coaxed into crying into their Jack Daniels by just the right mixture of wide-eyed patriotism and sentimentality where I played a set one time. I did my three hours behind a chicken wire mesh that kept out about a third of all the shit they threw and, while the waitresses were sweeping up the broken beer bottles in front of the stage, I went to the owner for my fee. He looks at me like he’s about to say the cleverest thing in the world and says “Paid in beers, wadnit?” It wasn’t. It was $50, a meal and a bed for the night. Calm like, I tell him this. He grins and by a slight movement of his head, indicates the shotgun hung above the bar. “Seems to me you look like the kind of guy that might come to an outta the way place like this and try and take the register. Seems to me I was to catch you in the act I’d be within my rights to shoot your thieving ass dead. Ain’t that right, Abner?” The bum at the bar says nothing, and without looking round flips open his wallet to reveal a badge. Figures. I look back at the barkeep and say levelly: “Yeah. Beers. I’ll take ‘em now.” The guy looks like he’s about to burst. “Ah, hell son, looks like Abner done got the last one!” He laughs a laugh that says he knows I can’t do shit, and there’s even an accompanying snigger from Abner. In a movie, this’d be roundabout the time where I started to laugh along with them, before pounding Abner’s head into the bar, vaulting over the counter, grabbing the shotgun and turning it on the sniveling bar owner, loading my pockets with greasy dollar bills and strolling out with the shotgun over one shoulder and my guitar on the other. Real easy way to get shot, there, and one of the things about being a strolling player is that the health insurance don’t add up to squat, so high risk things that might look good on a screen take a back seat to things like going outside and round back and taking a leak in the gas tank of Abner’s cruiser, which is exactly what I do.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Criminal
The Enthusiast
The fish don’t give a shit, I think, and it was at this point I realised I’d crossed a boundary and become a moody drunk. As I stood watching them, clutching a warm lager like a comfort blanket, they continued to swim out their tiny, insignificant lives, round the ornamental castle, through the moneywort and the torrent of bubbles from the filter, round the castle again, completely incognisant of the bacchanal on my side of the tank wall. Lucky bastards. Wish I was a fish. I bet they couldn’t even hear the thump of the bass from the party classics belting out of the ruinously expensive stereo on the other side of the room. Do fish hear? Or do they just feel vibrations in the water? Or isn’t that essentially the same thing anyway, “hearing” being an anthropocentric word to describe the experience of external stimuli? And why am I thinking about this now? When it comes to fish, my only concern should surely be the bigger ones I currently have to fry, but we’ll get there.
By Will Tudge2 years ago in Fiction