Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice
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About this ebook
'Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice' is a collection of short stories, flash fiction and allegorical fragments within the genre of weird fiction, triangulated between horror, fantasy and speculative fiction. While not precisely children's stories, they are often concerned with the infantile world of childhood, while the world of adulthood is extrapolated into ambiguous utopias painted in garish though sympathetic colours. The tone of the collection is pitched somewhere between the childishly spooky and the unpleasantly uncanny, as though R. L. Stine attempted to ghostwrite as Thomas Ligotti. Characteristically, the work is influenced as much by children's telefantasy of the 1990s – 'The Demon Headmaster', 'Round the Twist' and 'Through the Dragon's Eye – as by writers such as Robert Aickman, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Franz Kafka, Hermann Ungar, porpentine charity heartscape and Ursula Le Guin at her strangest. The author's PhD is in the philosophy of Czech animation and his hope is to achieve, on some small level, for literature what Raúl Ruiz and Jan Švankmajer achieved for cinema.
A. Gerald Whybray
Adam Whybray is a Film Studies lecturer with a podcast on children's horror writing curious horror stories, flash fiction and allegorical fragments. An anxious and earnest Unitarian with regrets and a lover of Czech puppets.
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Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice - A. Gerald Whybray
Bib and the Scarecrow
Made of Mice
By Dr. A. Gerald Whybray
Copyright 2019 Adam Whybray
Smashwords Edition
Contents
1
The Dream-Death Cops of Then and Now and Will Be
2
Mrs. Fletcher’s Home
3
Scarecrow Made of Mice
4
Eternal Angelic Punishment from the Ambrosial Godhead
5
GUNK
6
Dime of the Century –or– Return of the Director
7
Edgar-in-the-Box
8
Bib
9
Speech by the Mayor of Kendallmire
10
Old Books
The Dream-Death Cops of Then and Now and Will Be
He was a solipsist and guilty, so chose to spend his life in sleep, and then, in being dead. Later, they found a way to expand their terrain of judgement to even those far-flung regions. But that was now; is now; it will be now.
Mrs. Fletcher's Home
Mrs. Fletcher had a happy home, but her garden had no fence and her front drive had no gate. Mrs. Fletcher lived in a village, where the people were too close and rumours spread fast. The villagers would walk a little off the pavement into Mrs. Fletcher’s driveway; their rucksack, purse or briefcase would knock against her car. Smears of gravel, accidentally kicked, would spread from tarmac onto the edge of her lawn. The villagers wouldn’t rap upon the windows, but they would snap a twig or pull a leaf from the pear tree closest to the road. Mrs. Fletcher’s daughter Emma and her son Matthew would play in the garden and sometimes they would move from the garden, to the driveway, to the road, to the pavement, to the shop, buying sweets to take back home, crossing from one, to the other, to the other. The villagers would follow for a second and then their eyes would roll and they would tail off into their own homes, with arms full of eggs and cauliflowers. Matthew and Emma had friends and their faces would appear in the buddleia bush surrounded by butterflies, with their eyelids half shut and their mouths wide open. They would go ‘ow wow wow wow wow’ like cartoon red indians, with their rough hands against their mouths. On village fête days and summer days and especially busy traffic days, the villages might walk one, two, three, steps into Mrs. Fletcher’s garden, to avoid traffic… or, just in idleness, stretching their legs – drifting onto the property like daddy-longlegs.
Those friends of Matthew and Emma. They would play jokes. One, a small boy with a round red face, about eight, put his beetroot coloured tongue through the letterbox, in amongst the bristles. Lovers would kiss up against the house’s walls. First dates that would end at midnight, the adolescent sweat staining the bricks of Mrs. Fletcher’s house a creamy white.
Mrs. Fletcher had a foyer. A little vestibule where Matthew and Emma and herself would keep their shoes. The children’s shoes had laces like curly fries which you didn’t have to tie. Mrs Fletcher only had one pair of high-heeled shoes, but one day there were two. One time, one of Matthew’s velcro shoes was inside a larger man-sized leather shoe, but the other one of the pair couldn’t be found. Coming back from holiday, mud and dog shit had been trodden into the welcome mat, but nothing had been stolen and the house had not been entered.
The villagers would drift like a sea tide, in groups of ten and twelve, walking sideways like crabs towards the house, then back across the road toward the pavement, moving in a sine-wave. Some would come loose from the set and drift erratically at a hurried, frantic pace, eyes closed, into the foyer, banging up against the door, stupid and insensate, like a fly against a window. If they entered the house, they mostly confined themselves to the lower storey, but sometimes would crouch at the bottom of the stairs, reaching up, with muscular arms. The villagers were hairy, but their skin was smooth and their faces were small and freckled. They would coo and gurgle like babies and listen at the door to the bedtime stories Mrs. Fletcher read to Matthew and to Emma. Sometimes they would fall asleep but sometimes they would only be pretending.
One of the villagers was a policemen in a shiny black hat and another was a social worker and another had been a judge so Mrs. Fletcher could not ask the authorities to intervene and anyway, since the villagers had come into the house so slowly it was almost as though that they weren’t really inside at all, but rather, more and more of the house was becoming outside.
Mrs. Fletcher had two children, but maybe she