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  The night in which an unconventional bar singer performs

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  This land is a land of magic. Earthy magic so old, it is entwined in the very stars, sun, and moon that have existed since the dawn of conceptualised time. Earthy magic, burnt onto every blade of grass and mound of soil. Magic that, when disturbed, creates a musty smell and forms a haze of pure trickery. Magic so powerful and old, it has entangled itself like a twining plant into the cracks of time.

  Magic changes everything. Every aspect of normal life is here one moment, then gone the next. In a puff. Maybe by a leaf falling to the ground - if by that point it is still a leaf - or maybe some footsteps kicked up some magic dust. Those who inhabit this land have learnt to deal with the inevitable disorder and chaos produced by magic. They have little time to ruminate on the cause of these changes. The cause is insignificant, really. Honest.

  Within this world filled with chaos, a small town of old resided. Once a thriving hub, a market town, it was now set in ruin. Its residents often grumbled, ‘Crumbledgard by name, crumbled by nature’ - and crumbled it was. Its once magnificent stone buildings were all in disarray; blocks and blocks of them had crumbled away.

  Soon after the purple smog had settled, skilled artisans left the town - leaving only a few steadfast crumbolians in its wake - and as such the plight of the buildings was left unchecked for a good while. Makeshift modifications were made, which gave the look of a shanty town, a stone slum. Though ugly in appearance, these modifications were functional and on the whole aided the crumbolians against their magical adversary - the purple haze.

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  Dark flecks of wood grain were distorted by a golden brown liquid. It lapped at the sides of its cylindrical container - bubbling and swirling in an eager anticipation. The bubbles rose and rose, escaping the pit beneath them. One particular bubble raced to the top and breached the layer of froth above it. As it reached the surface, its mouth opened wide and it took in the fresh air.

  Pop.

  The ocean of bubble spirits swirled and frothed some more. The frothy waves sloshed against the wooden rim rhythmically. A few unlucky spirits splashed over as green fingers curled round the handle, bringing the wooden vessel upwards to briefly meet our protagonist’s lips.

  This particular crumbolian, Kally, was of an average height and slim - a bit of a waif. The features of her face were typical of her clan, those large soulful eyes, contrasting with her tiny nose. Her ears, flat and pointy flaps, hugged the side of her head. Her hair was long and currently slicked back, the colour matching her eyes: brown. Though in certain lights, they both - atypically to her clan - turn auburn. Her current garb was simple, a black dress and a dark red robe with overly large brown boots, scuffed and worn.

  Kally sipped her drink. On normal days she was more of a gulper but today, today she needed to slow down. To appreciate. She looked again into the swirling head of her beer, hugging her wooden glass with her hands. A drink hugger; she’ll be dunking biscuits in it soon.

  What can she do? She sipped again, like she did last time. What else can she do?

  Drink then sleep. Drink then sleep. Rinse and repeat. What else is there to do? The only thing left then is to drink. Drink and think. She was not much of a fan of her own thoughts so she would drink to drown them. Today though, she was in a different mood. A mood that troubled the others. Those around were eyeballing her suspiciously. They had seen her like this before. That one time. The time her toe, you know, did that thing.

  The patron closest to her shuffled his chair, trying to manoeuvre further away from her without drawing attention to himself. She looked up from her drink.

  “What’s wrong, Kian?”

  He smiled and cleared his aching throat. “Nothing, Kally. Just got the fidgets.”

  She laughed. “Sounds like you, my dear.”

  She brought her attention back to her beer.

  The head had settled down, frothing less. She took a large gulp and another. Time passed. Kally stopped abruptly, and grimaced. The throb of her toe was painful. More painful this time than the last. She reached down to soothe it, massaging her boot with her hand. It was no good. She rushed to take her boot off. The others watched on. Some left.

  “It’s happening again,” someone whispered and was met with harsh hushes.

  Wide eyed, they edged towards the edges of the room, weighing up the choice between staying or chancing the outside.

  Kally, frantic, slid her sock off her foot and revealed the toe within. A bloodied stump, animated. Its bulging eyes were blackened as blood poured out. The skin of the toe was cracked and sore, and covered in pus filled sacs. Kally stopped the bleeding by adding pressure to the toe’s eyes. They wailed.

  Once the bleeding was stemmed, the toe began to sing.

  Kally rolled her eyes and hit her head with her hand. She succumbed to her nightly misery. Her routine. The same people, the same performance - or so she thought. A strange shadowed figure in the corner of the room sharply lifted their head in surprise and fixed their gaze upon her.

  “Stop. Why won’t you stop?” she cried out.

  The others sat down again, eased. This was not going to be a repeat of that time. Just the nightly show they had been accustomed to for the past eight years. As long as they remembered to applaud once it was over, they would be fine.

  Kally banged her head on the table and stayed there, arms folded beneath her head.

  Her toe tugged at her leg to bring it up to an awkward angle, a table top performance.

  Karin, the bartender, walked over to Kally’s table and handed her another beer.

  “I’ve added something special to it, to help you out.”

  Kally, without looking up, took a large swig of the beer and fell into her usual stupor. The world became bleary, everything slightly muffled. Slightly more bearable.

  She stared at the walls, in an attempt to avoid her reality. Those familiar walls were dressed in wood chipping paper and had started flaking many years ago. Stacks of logs were piled into corners and leaned against it for no apparent reason apart from an overabundance of wood.

  Though crumbolian architectural structures are made from stone, interiors are often full of all things wooden. Wooden chairs and tables are pretty commonplace in bars, but wooden lamps, glasses and rugs are not so much. Everything, head to toe, in Karin’s bar was made of wood. Rough and harsh to touch, but rustic and comforting to look at.

  Splinters were a common ailment after visiting the bar, but no one had decided wood was a bad idea. You are supposed to spit out the splinters you get from your drink or rather, spit out the wood before it splinters.

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  A strange game they play.

  I guess they have to do something with their time, whilst in a constant state of limbo. It’s better than drinking into oblivion anyway.

  Soon, Kally’s toe fell back into its slumber. She stumbled up to the bar. A slight limp in her left leg.

  “Did you enjoy the show?” she asked Karin.

  “As much as I ever do Kally. How about you?”

  “Oh ye—shh, I thought it was grand.” She smiled sheepishly. “Think the drink will have—hic—helped though.”

  Karin laughed. “Thought as much.”

  She swayed and looked around. Most people had already left. She could not quite place the uncomfortable feeling radiating from one of the corners of the room but thought nothing more of it.

  “I guess it’s nearly closing time?”

  Karin nodded.

  “Hmm, I won’t trouble you for much longer then. Should—hic—probably head home soon anyway.”

  Karin noticed a tinge of something peculiar in her voice.

  “Kally, is there nothing that can be done?”

  She smiled. Pretending to be unaware of his meaning, she replied, “Of course there is something. A pint—hic—of water before bed will fix my ail—hic!—ment.”

  “You know what I mean. About your toe, about this whole magic situation.”

  Sighing, and almost brought back sober, she said, “But what can we do? We are only a few crumbolians. I guess we just need to realise that this is our lot in life. Hopeless to be—hic—hopeful, kind of thing.”

  “I really hope that’s not the case.”

  “Me too Karin, me too, really.” Kally stood up to gather her things from the table and looked out of the window, absentmindedly playing with the shutter.

  ???

  The facade of the bar just frequented was, like most crumbolian buildings, crumbled. The wooden sign emblazoned with his name hung askew. It was fastened tightly with plentiful nails and determination. The windows were narrow with sliding shutters so they could be employed as a line of defence against that familiar purple. One of these shutters was moving slightly. Apart from that, the building itself was unremarkable.

  Above the bar, and all around, the purple sky blazed on. The tepid smog blustered through the maze of ruined buildings, swirling and weaving in a dance of delight. Demonic in nature, but godly in appearance. Magic had been particularly changeable that day, brought on by the smog. The customary warning had been issued to the residents to stay indoors. Most were heeding the warning and sitting it out. An involuntary shudder passed through them all at the mere thought of the last incident.

  Poor Tommy had no legs to show for his troubles now.

  After all, they had changed into snakes and slithered away. No one had the heart to tell him of the discovery deep in the forest: the two bloodied legs, half-eaten by wolves. Sometimes he still wondered about their fate.

  Despite the warnings, some residents were still milling about - congregating outside Karin’s - fed up with being cooped up. These days they always had to stay inside for their own good. The incident with Tommy was not an isolated incident. Numerous misfortunes had befallen the population. Many a limb, even the odd eyeball, had misplaced themselves. Some were lucky enough that the magic did not last long enough for permanent damage. Some were not so lucky. By far the worst was the fate of Richie Trawler - his skin turned to sawdust and fell right off him. It changed back pretty instantly, into a heap on the floor, but there was no fixing him after that. The magic had gotten within him, glitching his very existence.

  Beyond the bar was a maze of streets with imposing buildings. The old town hall, as an example, should be avoided. Its stature was such that if hit by a stray block you would not recover. The way was halfheartedly boarded up with planks of wood, only a slight warning needed. No one in their right mind would attempt that way.

  To the right of this blocked passage was the well trodden path, with smaller buildings and small creatures. The rats that had remained scurried like insects nibbling on strange purple mushrooms that should not be ingested. Due to this, no rat looked the same. Grotesque-looking creatures, shape-shifting involuntarily. One rat might have an ear on its back, straight from a science textbook. Another, may be a mound of goo slugging along the cobbled street. This particular rat had a crumbolian’s face bulging out of its own - a horrific yet ridiculous sight. It made it incredibly difficult for it to walk around, its second head thwacking the ground with every step.

  A gust of purple whizzed past the rat, knocking it off its feet. The purple took a sharp turn and headed in the direction of the river bank, twisting and turning through the trees before it. It hit the river and rebounded upwards and swirled back in the sky.

  Instead of taking the left as the purple did, if you take a right and walk a while, you would reach Tommy’s abode. His home was a simple-looking house - detached, stone and box-like - with a painted door. The only painted door on the street. Dark, vibrant and green, it invites you to knock upon it.

  ???

  Tommy himself was indoors, as he often was of late, perched on his kitchen side entertaining his grandchild. Since the incident, he had been putting on sock puppet shows with his hands and stumps. That’s the spirit, Tommy, making the best of a bad situation. Magic can take everything, but your humour. Humour quite often is the only thing left.

  This particular show was a variant of Punch and Judy, an ancient tradition amongst the humans, from a time long ago. From the looks of it, Punch was a foul tempered man, particularly displeased with his sister Judy, who had made a foul-looking pie. She must have been his sister, as no wife would surely put up with Punch. A child sat cross-legged, gawping up at the limp socks, seemingly enjoying the show. Small children will be amused at anything.

  As the socks flailed around at each other, the little boy cheered. The conflict is always the best bit.

  “Again!” he cried.

  The green sock of Punch chased after the red sock of Judy, before finally hitting her over the head with a rather crudely fashioned bludgeon. Poor Judy and her infant son.

  After a few rounds of this, the boy was put to bed. Tommy, with great effort, dragged himself to his wooden wingback arm chair to face the window. He had taken to watching the smog at night these… ahem… nights.

  As he looked out, he saw a solitary woman - old and battered-looking - who was leaning against the church wall, looking out at the sky. Fine purple dust had settled on the old slabs of stone around her.

  She spat.

  Her Hawaiian shirt, garishly floral, seemed to tremble as it licked her cream shorts. Her hair was wayward and apple green, curling like used floss; a strange mix of crisp and soggy. She spat again. Looking upwards, she sighed. “Looks like another great day,” she drawled at a passerby. He scurried through his doorway, barely looking back at her. No one can afford feelings of sympathy anymore. No one can escape unscathed from the smog.

  She laughed. “Oh Betsy,” she mumbled. “What will become of you? You can’t carry on like this. Oh no.”

  Her head snapped towards a cry. “Betsy, what are you doing, love? Come inside before something happens to you. It’s only a matter of time now…”

  “Ha, time,” she mumbled again to herself, in a habit she had picked up over the years. “Time is a constant— just about the only thing that stays the same in this world. Tick-tock, tick-tock in that same rhythmic and urgent beat.”

  She slowly turned her head away and again looked up at the smog.

  “We clutch to the idea of meaning so we are not wasting our time. Time. A made-up construct to make our own insignificance bearable. The self-importance and arrogance of humans created time… and look what happened to them. Time.

  Oh, for me to run out of time…”

  She sighed again, still watching the sky. Magic could be quite beautiful really, looking at it from afar. The swirling colours above, thriving and mixing, almost reminiscent of an old Icelandic skyline. Those days were long gone though, folklore. To Betsy, ethereal music seemed to be surrounding her as the world slowed and throbbed. She could smell a crisp floral odour and her fingers tingled.

  The smog encroached and she stared transfixed, awaiting the fate. Her mumbling lips, agape and floundering, still whispered her incoherent thoughts. She longed for it to be over. The release from this insane world.

  ???

  Betsy got her wish.

  Who says dreams don’t come true in this place?

  °??───? Author’s Note ?───??°

  Thank you for joining Kally for her nightly ritual of beer, sorrow, and cursed toe performances.

  This first chapter plants us firmly in Crumbledgard’s splinter-ridden heart: a town held together by stubbornness and battered by the purple haze. I wanted to introduce the strange, unstable magic of this world through the eyes of Kally who's long since given up trying to make sense of it - until something unexpected (and possibly stalkery) in the bar corner threatens to shift her nightly routine.

  If you’re here for melancholic barflies, grotesque comedy, or just cursed sentient body parts that sing unbidden—welcome aboard. Things only get weirder from here.

  Let me know what stuck with you, what made you squirm, or if you too have a haunted toe.

  (≧?≦)

  ? Coming up - Chapter 2 title ?

  °??───?? The school day in which the magic was let in and the pickle jar gains a use ??───??°

  ~ SK Payde

  ? ? ?