The exercise:
Write about: the puzzle.
Got a 1,000 piece puzzle from a friend on my 40th birthday. Had started in on it in Kat's parents basement, as our old place didn't have space for it, but then forgot about it. Kat's parents returned it to me when we moved here and Kat and the boys got into it on one of our snow days last week - I came home from work and it was all over our coffee table.
It's coming along pretty well, actually. Miles has no patience for it, Max has slightly more, so it's mostly been me and Kat. I'll share a picture once it's done.
2 comments:
Haha, so you have no coffee table until it's finished! My father likes jigsaw puzzles like that: he got a large piece of plywood to do them on, which could be slid under a chair or couch out of the way while it's being solved but you need the floor/table space for other things. If you only have one puzzle that might be overkill, but I think it's a neat way of using "lost" space under chairs.
Puzzle
The silence in the graveyard was heavy, almost predatory; Collins felt as though it was going to thicken into a ghostly blanket at any moment and smother him. He ran through his conversation options in his head and decided that asking about lunch was a bad idea, and that no-one wanted to hear that he’d spent yesterday evening watching Black Mirror’s second season.
“Are the graves single-occupancy?” asked Adams at last. Collins looked up from his feet, puzzled, but the Inspectral seemed to think it was a good question.
“Check the headstones,” he said, and his voice was so quiet and yet so penetrating that Collins realised he preferred the silence. “War graves do sometimes bury people together. If it’s intentional then the headstone will list all the names, or at least a count of bodies.”
Collins and Adams got the task of reading the headstones, which had been hurriedly made and inscribed, and had suffered badly from weathering already. They knelt, carefully and gingerly, on the disturbed soil of the graves to read the lettering, while the Inspectral kept a cautious distance. Collins poked a headstone and was surprised to see it crumble where he touched it. He tried to gently rub dirt from part of the inscription but stopped when he realised that he was rubbing the inscription away.
“Radiance,” said Adams. “Don’t touch them if you can help it, they’re as friable as cottage cheese. Plus they’ll have been made with cheap aggregrate: there’s never been good stone around Moreton.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Puzzle it out, Collins. That’s how you learn things.”
Each headstone listed four names, though they could make out fewer than half of them. The Inspectral sighed, a sound like the wind blowing through trees on a dark, rainy night.
“So there’s the potential for 24 skulls, and we have 7 accounted for,” he said. “Which means we’ve probably got to disinter the lot and find out what else, if anything is missing. This is not going to sit well with the Brass, and if the newspaper gets wind of it we can expect outrage and posturing.” He rubbed his hands together and they passed through one another, turning and roiling like bubbles in a pan of boiling water. “Let’s see what the RE has to say, but… by the Light of the Radiance I don’t want to request an exhumation for war graves.”
“You can just ask me what I’m going to say,” said a new voice.
“Ethel?” The Inspectral everted himself, saving time on turning round by simply twisting his head and somehow stepping through his own body. Collins swallowed hard as his stomach twisted from watching it; despite the intellectual knowledge that the Inspectral was long-dead, on an emotional level he still assumed that the ghostly shape was still solid in some way.
The man who was coming through the iron gateway had a mane of red hair that cascaded off his head like a waterfall and crashed down to just below his shoulders. The moustache – slightly more blonde than ginger, and the huge beard made him look like a wild animal. He was huge; bigger than stocky or rugby-build, and visibly muscular despite his great-coat wrapped around him and buttoned tight. Collins found himself looking at the ground to see if he was floating or not, but if he was a ghost then he was standing right at ground level and Collins couldn’t see proof either way.
“Ethel?” Adams sounded amused.
“Short for Ethelred,” said the RE, beaming a smile at her that seemed to have the intensity of sunlight. “Better than Red, which is what a lot of people try first.”
“And last,” said the Inspectral.
Greg - yeah, we actually had it on a large piece of cardboard in Kat's parents basement, just to get it out of the way when we weren't working on it. Which ended up being... over a year.
But Kat and I finished it tonight, so I shall get a picture of it in the daylight tomorrow. I've got posts scheduled through to Friday, but I will try to remember to update tomorrow's before it goes up.
Love the way the Inspectral 'turned around'. And I like your intro to Ethel - I look forward to getting to know him a bit better. Also: possibly 24 skulls! That would be quite something. One for every hour of the day, perhaps.
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