All my Fault

Toby sat hunched on the curb-side with his head in between his legs. It was as though the weight of the news was literally crushing him. He did not go to his wife’s car - or what was left of it. He was not moving. He could not move.

Even though Patricia was ‘in spirit’ and no longer alive, she could hear and smell and see what was going on, as though it was close by her. She could taste the petrol on the road, and heard a woman in the background crying, she could see the other vehicle jammed up against the hedgerow with some small figure sitting in the back.

“It's all my fault” the woman was screaming, “I was looking into my phone; I just did not see it coming.”

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

World's Collide

Molly looked around. Her birth mother, in spirit form, had been holding her all this time while her grandmother, who was also in spirit, was talking with her.

“It was a terrible accident my dear, but you are alright now, I promise", she said for what felt like the fiftieth time.

“Cars can be like that” she continued explaining - “one minute you were in the world, and the next you can be taken out of it.”

The toddler pushed her head into her mother’s shoulder, wrapped her arm around her neck and clung tight. She started crying again.

“It’s the shock of it all” her grandmother said to her daughter, who was staring into a worldly window where she could see her husband at the scene of the crash. His own car had just pulled up behind the police van, and the ambulance had turned off its lights, resting there, waiting for the Coroner to appear.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

Starting Over

“My life is over” she wailed.

“No, no my dear, it’s really not. You have to just pick yourself up and start again.”

Her life as she knew it was over.

Starting again meant the whole reincarnation and being a baby again - a long protracted time of feeding and crawling, and walking, and, with God knows what type of parents.

“I am so sorry that it came to this”, the voice soothingly said.

“It's just that … that I thought I would have more time.”

“We all think that, whether ninety - or two."

“But I was only two, and my mother loved me very much.”

“Yes, I know dear, she did. And she is with you right now.”

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

Staring at the Basket

Robertus was not a kind man: he did what he could, he maintained his family as best he might - however, he was not loved, for he was rarely loveable.

His wife Isabelle, was considerably younger. She was not Johnathon’s mother, but a substitute, being his second wife after the early death of the first wife who passed from a rupture to the stomach, that came from a blow from Robertus.

When Jonathon returned home he found that Isabelle was gone. She had left behind a note and a loaf of cake.

Exhausted, Jon sat beside the pitted bench, staring at the basket with the unknown head inside.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

Costly Money

The horses had all died - not one pony, mule or nag, remained. It was a disease that no one understood, and so everyone thus attributed their deaths to bewitchment.

The village of Farnham was small, and the one and only metal-smithy would clean his tools in the trough nightly - the same trough that the horses would drink from when coming to be fitted for shoes. Eventually the lead in the water from the shoes had poisoned each and every one of them.

Without the income from the horse shoe manufactory Jonathon’s father, Robertus, had tried to supplement the family’s fare with counterfeit coin. He would work on his marvellous imprints forged in tin alloy, weathering each with a dint and a scratch, for added authenticity. He was however, in a fairly short time, caught out, when one merchant felt his purse to be too light for the contents within.

Of course it was an offence against the coffers of the King to use his portrait on tin replicas of Silver - and Robertus was consequently sentenced to death.

And so with the few pieces left over that were overlooked in the confiscation, Jonathon had set out to redeem his Father’s head after it had been excised.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

Two Huge Fellows

These two huge fellows [Mastiffs] had been bequeathed to her a few years before from a dying man to whom she had tended to in his final hours; however, the man had survived the pox, and with his renewed life, had decided to go on an adventure, leaving behind his chickens and his dogs.

Fatima would have preferred the chickens but the neighbour had collected them in stay of the rent still owing. To whit, the warmth of these giants kept her alive throughout the long nights, and secure in their protection, and so she was ever grateful for his parting gift.

Each wore a thin bracelet of silver around one ankle, where their name was inscribed in cursive script. Both had had their tails clipped and wore neck-chiefs made from leather. Each had a black raven tattooed inside one ear. Paul was blind (thus his name) and Pete was lame.

The butcher would bring Fatima his bonemeal, which she would mix with the grain. They were her only family, and she loved them well.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series

Peter & Paul

It was in the early hours of the morning when Fatima woke to go about her chores. The cold air bit her neck as she unwound her night scarf and replaced it with her worn woollen shawl. The stone floor beneath her feet was glazed with frost, and the hearth was cold, bereft of its usual succouring warmth.

At the age of fourteen Fatima had been weakened with a heart condition, and two years later, her lips were mostly a shade of blue … yet this morning they were grey and soon to blush with the dawn.

“Up!” She called in command to her sleeping dogs.

Obstinately both stayed draped upon her small straw mattress. The hay there was regularly exchanged to then become fodder for the cow, although soured by the canine scent, flattened with the weight of her mastiffs, who lay on its blanket in a tangle of limbs and slobber.

Fatima tugged on the covers to wake them, and then, when that did not move the hounds, she pulled the blanket abruptly from under them. Pete groaned, Paul slept on.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series