#AStoryAWeek | Week 16 (Apr 14 - Apr 20): Jangle (Excerpt)

For the last couple of weeks I've been having some laptop issues - I don't what I did, but something stopped it getting on-line and my version of Word stopped working. Luckily I have OpenOffice, so I don't NEED Word (Ha! Sucks to you, random software error!), but I hate blogging from my iPhone, so that has been somewhat limited. But hooray! As you can see I have cleverly (and with some assistance from Safe Mode and a number of on-line tools and downloads) fixed the thing. So here, somewhat belatedly, is an excerpt from last week's #AStoryAWeek.



Week 16 | 1,277 Words


Jangle

Fifteen years later and the sound that always made Ally's skin crawl and set her teeth on edge was that of change falling to the ground. It was such an infrequent little noise, but whilst everyone else scurried to pick up fallen coins she would be frozen to the spot, made dumb and immobile by the deep and crawling memory of fear. The memory of fear, she would conclude in safer and mostly drunker moments, was ultimately a piss poor copy of the original sensation. Memories were unpredictable in their chronology and their ability to stick around, making you feel weird and empty for days on end. They were fleeting and random; a glimpse of a boy grinning over his pint. The soft sound of four people running through an empty playing field. The hush of evening breeze. The scream of a horn. A girl, raising a questioning eyebrow. Sniggers. Coins falling.

The memories were chilling and annoying, but mostly they generated a new type of fear; a growing smirk in the dark that there were nothing, were insignificant, next to the thing that had created them.

That one terrifying night that had given birth to all these baby heebie-jeebies was still the mother of all scares. But as well as being a powerful lady she was a fertile one, and here Ally was, thirty-one years old, ever so adult, and still turned into mush by one silly tinkling noise.

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