Tall Tales and Short Stories

By Leyland A King

This book offers another opportunity to appreciate the value of family and kinship ties. From Mr. Kings prior publication, Imperfect Families: Setting Free the Skeletons of Kinship Neglect, a reader might recall this statement, . . . time spent with your children is precious. Just being at home regularly and talking about whatever is sufficient for the emotional development and comfort of every member of the family. Just talk.

In some ways, Tall Tales and Short Stories complements that important sentiment.

There are, contained in this book, a variety of stories suitable for fun and sharing but useful, too, in communicating values held dear over generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524551841

Leyland A King

Leyland A. King was superintendent of Police (Fmr.), Child Protective Investigations Program Administrator (Ret.) and holds a master's degree in mental health counseling and agency development fromTroy State University.He is also a Certified Public Manager (CPM). Mr. King resides with his family in Florida, USA. Mr. King may be contacted through his blog, BlueGadfly.com.

Book preview

3.jpgimage01.jpg

CHEERS TO THE LAST IDIOT

By Leyland A. King

October 5, 2016

T WO DISPIRITED, DARK horses ambled their way along the dim, well accustomed route. The fact that both proceeded, seemingly, with bowed heads was not related to weightiness of the thick, wooden container and cargo they pulled. The task was quite manageable for any team, or even one strong horse, for that matter. It might be imagined, therefore, that the morbid expressions of on-lookers who positioned themselves on both sides of the rugged street to spectate, communicated their aggregate dispositions to the horses, thus the animals’ droopy appearance. The witnesses, regretting yet again having seen what they had long awaited, hurriedly sought God’s protection by blessing themselves through the sign of the cross. Appalled by sight, sound and putrid smell, they –most of them, that is -inexplicably relived the sensate experiences the very next day. Tomorrow, many would return to the same place along the roadside, and so do, the day following that. Compelled -one might reasonably conjecture- not by curiosity, but by a palpable, indiscriminate terror.

Late, grey twilight bid a long-lingering farewell to flavescent lights of neighbouring buildings. Together they illuminated the event somewhat, but it traded one hue for another. The latter randomly flung about deep, animated, scowling shadows.

Two lamps, hung on the vehicle’s backside. A capricious torch affixed at the right ell near the front, all helped on-lookers to discern the grim countenance of the driver’s small, sallow face, sunken cheeks; his weathered skin so creased, that the streaks and furrows held their own murkiness. They too, appeared shifting by the flicker of the torch beside him. One assumed he had eyes. Obscured by an old, black hat flopped about his ears, the eyes kept their privacy as did his hair. It is difficult to say more of him, other than clothed in something dark, he outlined an eerie silhouette that magnified his thin, drawn shoulders and a slumped back. The driver sat unmoving, leaned on his elbows which in turn appeared stuck on his bent knees propping him as near upright as they could. Small, white bony fore-fingers gently rubbed the worn reigns that laid slack across his palms and hung loosely between the patient horses. He looked, one might even say stared, fixedly ahead and never spoke a word. Not even a single word to his two bedraggled, featureless assistants trailing. So still sat the driver, that he could quite pardonably, be imagined an appendage to the whole ghastly transport. The horses’ clip, a near imperceptible pause, then a predictable clop, served to give a semblance of life to an otherwise surreal mise en sce’ne.

Pestilence, the cause for the immediate tribulation, had a few weeks ago made another ravaging decent upon the City of London. It began during the summer of 1665. Thousands were carried off to mass graves every shuddersome night. The reason for the nocturnal burials was, supposedly, to mitigate the ugliness, for the appalling events were extremely distressing to the residents, but it might also have been that the dead were so many -estimated over 100,000 people deceased in less than a year -represented a quarter of the city’s population.

But efficiency might have played its part too, the practice being that the dead were put-out beside the street for the collection carts -ominously monikered the dead-carts -similar to the way a city manages its garbage disposal today. A cruel efficiency might also have been behind the fact that ailing, incapacitated persons were sometimes thrown into the dead-cart, the rationale being, that since they were soon going to die anyway, why not get it over with promptly rather than stop again the very next night. A tale popular then, told of the event when a drunken vagrant found himself collected. It was said, that he overcame his stupor when swung into the muddy mass grave’s cold water. His horrific tumult extricating himself from a tangle of arms and legs so scared the graveside labourers, they scattered, adding their own screams to the drunkard’s. No one knows if there were any other similar calamities.

Fearful of the disease’s ugliness and excruciating pain it caused, relatives sometimes killed their beloved kin or laid them semi-conscious somewhere on the route of the dead-carts. True to human avarice, the bearers stripped the corpses of whatever they thought useable, thus it was not uncommon to witness naked bodies sprawled up, down, whichever ignominious way they landed in the cart. As is often the case the poor suffered the worst once more, from man-made situations they did not create and could not alleviate nor escape. The well-to-do fled the city in droves with their entourages, for the less hazardous, isolation of the countryside. The contagion reigned. Unchecked, its rapidity decimating the cities denizens.

Some say, the Black Death -Bubonic plague as later identified -was introduced by flea infested rodents that scurried ashore in London’s ports, from trading ships that plied the Asian routes. Whatever the cause, the meagre food, the severely over-crowded, substandard, fetid condition of London’s East End, unconscionably neglected and exploited to the point of humans sleeping amongst pigs, people bedding on straw and rotating the use of rented bed space; lack of infrastructure for human waste disposal, or even elementary sanitation, helped spread the disease like wildfire in high winds’ way.

The authorities and the well-to-do, were not alarmed in the initial stage of the plague. They regarded the beginnings as just another flu that took with it some of the poor and leave