Into Slumber

Back in 2007 I was a member of a blogging site called Journalspace, and a friend I’d made there posted a vignette in her blog called White Ribbon . I found it captivating, and asked her what the story behind it was, but she said it was simply an image that had sprung into her head. She knew neither what had happened before its beginning nor what was to happen after its ending. She pressed me several times to expand it into a short story myself, but sadly, despite repeated attempts, I failed to satisfy her demands. However, in 2020, almost 13 years later, I decided to have a go at illustrating it. Here are both her vignette (reproduced with her permission) and my painting. It is highly stylised, and does not entirely match the text, but it was the best I could manage. I felt I had made at least some step towards compensating for my earlier inadequacy, though the idea of writing a complete story still haunts me. White ribbons hang carelessly from the ceiling. Three are strung tightly.

Helen had returned to the old family home for her father’s funeral, and had stayed to sort through the house’s contents. She’d been more than glad to accept the family solicitor’s offer to arrange the funeral, and to handle the legal and financial side of things, but she felt bound to check through the property herself to make sure nothing of personal value would be lost when the house was cleared and it was put on the market. She had grown up in the place; she was already thoroughly familiar with what lay in it, and was confident that there was nothing of particular intrinsic value among the more substantial household items such as furniture, but the paperwork was a different matter. Her father hadn’t been one to throw things away, even after they’d long ceased to be of importance, and bills, receipts and bank statements alone filled a couple of filing cabinets. Letters, both business and personal, were stored in boxes in the attic; she had been rather dismayed when a superficial glan

Pinterest is a wonderful resource. I use it to find images of beautiful girls, so I can identify them and abduct them, then imprison them in my basement to use them as sex slaves – though, given my advancing age, I admit I am more likely to require them to do the washing up than to perform erotic acts. Still, I have a need for attractive young women who can provide both sexual pleasure and perform domestic chores. A sex-slave-cum-maidservant, if that doesn’t sound too vulgar. The odd thing is that I hadn’t realised until quite recently that there already was an American term for such a girl that summarised her function perfectly. I came across it quite inadvertently. I’d been browsing through the images of potential new victims Pinterest was offering to me, and had found one very pretty girl whose charming smile had enchanted me. It even looked for a moment as if she had a pair of handcuffs attached to her bag, which would have proved useful when the time for her abduction came, but t

Sometimes I feel people don’t take me entirely seriously when I make comments about their appalling standards of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But I have proof of the perils that lie in store for them if they continue in their slovenly ways. Artificial humans are even now being sent to test the grammatical skills of the members of Facebook and similar social networking sites, and if they fail, to kill them. Last year they carried out a trial on the employees of a certain well-known company. Now they are ready to continue their task in the rest of the English-speaking world. You don’t believe me? I invite you to view the image below, and to accept the truth.