Half a Sixpence by D.F. Lewis

The lady intoned familiar nursery-rhymes with a plaintive smile. The child lifted its poppy face mock half-heartedly to the heaven of this mother’s face and stammered out: “Mummy I love you so much I love you even more than all the money in the world … plus sixpence.” There was much giggling at the in-joke’s addition of sixpence — then followed by the near religious wireless occasion of “Listen With Mother” on the BBC Home Service. Are you feeling comfortable? Then we shall begin. Once upon a time, the world was covered in houses and mansions. On each there stood a climbing-frame which was called a Roof, after its inventor’s name. There were forces normally outside our reality that fancied these Roofs as roosts. They arrived from the sky — clucking Old Ones as kites with flapping wing-spans that were out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. And with no bellies if truth were known. These entities tended to perch and preen themselves, but only when darkness was darker than their own bodies. It was their scrabbling claws on the slates that gave them away to the slumberers within. Some knew these indeed to be the Old Ones from a mythology beyond the reach of the previously oldest mythology. The child half-slumbered in its narrow cot. The nursery fire had long since diminished to the smallest petal of flame and, as the coals’ house of frozen ashes crumbled into the grate, with a dying whimper, the half-child heard the tell-tale scuttling across the Roof to the bedroom’s bay window. “The Fictons are struts on which Roof contraptions are built” came the whisperingly curdled message from the slate-shuffling entity’s wrinkled lips in an alien language and thus mistranslated, whilst pursing its deadly sucker down to the frost-crazed glass of the bedroom window. And the half-child, half-slumberer whispered back: “Tick tick tick tick…” like the deadened beat of the near unwound nursery clock. “Thrupenny bit the Cat”, the half-child continued to intone, as if inventing a brand new nursery-rhyme refrain of its own, on the hoof, as it were. The Old Ones thus somehow took fright at the horror which under-breathed the half-child’s voice and the dire implications that were therein held for Mother Earth. And the single most ancient of the Old Ones took vast wing from the half-child’s Roof, heading for even older parts of mythology and reality — and squawking fit to wake up the world, it led the less vast wings of its compatriots as if they were the flirtatious tail of an infinite kite. They despaired at the fate of those human beings left behind, the latter dreaming as they were beneath Mr. Roof’s crazy shingled contraptions. And maybe the houses and mansions themselves knew something more about these matters. Whatever the case, the world dies a little bit extra with each entropic tick of the clock. That is what we call life’s own dream and nightmare’s truth — give or take an odd half-sixpence.

*** More fictoniatures – https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/11/fictoniatures/