The Village Message Board - An Excerpt From Villager

From Villager by Tom Cox: “Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. ...” This chapter from Villager is told entirely in the form of an online village message board.

 Judith Sparrow: Has anyone spotted a horse rug on their travels? Purple, with red stripes. Last seen up near Hood Gate. Any information appreciated. My Thomas is getting cold.

Terence Black: Fantastic fish and chips tonight at the Stonemason’s Arms. Just right. Mushy peas.

Diana Wilson: I had some last week. Overcooked.

Gary Oliver: Everyone keep their eye out there’s a drone around in the night sky been seen looking for something worth pinching.

Gary Oliver: Don’t suppose anybody has two concrete slabs they don’t need any more?

Terence Black: Be vigilant about scam phone calls. A number has been calling me. International. Says I have been in a car crash nonsense I haven’t.

Jennifer Cocker: Are Roger and Sheila OK? Haven’t seen them for a while. They’re very old and having trouble getting around now.

Sheila Winfarthing: We are fine. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Cocker: Someone should go round and check on them. I can’t. I have the kids.

Sheila Winfarthing: I’m right here.

Gary Oliver: Anyone who has any engine oil they don’t need please let me know. It shouldn’t go to waste and can be used for heating my stone sheds.

Alan Rockwell: TALK ON OLD WOODCRAFT. WHAT HAVE WE LOST? UNDERHILL VILLAGE HALL. September 8th. 7 p.m. Alan Rockwell discusses woodland arts. SAMPLES FROM TALK: Sawn elm is often used for the partitions in cowsheds and other places where animals live, as it can cope with the kick of any beast. Cleft oak is often used for the rungs of ladders and can be trusted for its resilience. What does trimming a cleft with a froe mean? Find out. Snacks and non-alcoholic drinks. Entry £3.50.

Penelope Ralph: We have some oil you can have, Gary. But please can you return the drum afterwards.

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The Homeowners Association by Steve Vermillion - Eclectica Magazine

My wife is gone. I've been alone for years now. I work and come home. Nothing happens. My only real pleasure is Judy. She lives across the street. She's divorced and has zero interest in me. That's what I like about her. She has remote blond hair and emanates an infinite inaccessible love. I have little hope of ever making her mine, but maybe that's the point. What else is there to say of her? She has heart-shaped hips, caustic, incendiary eyes, and most of the time she's angry and bothered and is never happy to see me unless she is borrowing my leaf blower. She is the president of our homeowners association, though, so to be near her, I volunteer as the sergeant at arms for our monthly meetings. It's only an honorary position. I don't really have any authority. Still, I live for our monthly homeowners meetings. No one asks me to, but I like to create little appetizers and pass them around. The day before also leaves me time for working on my anxiety and maybe choosing something to wear.

Anyway, three pigs purchased the three lots next to my home. What are the odds? Each bought their own undeveloped lot. The association members didn't approve of the idea of pigs moving into the neighborhood, which I can understand. They didn't come right out and say it, but you just know when you know. I have nothing against pigs myself. My philosophy is live and let live, laissez faire. Grass is always greener. A friend in need. Things like that. Yes, there was an antipathy toward the pigs from the very beginning, but here's the deal—and it's just like my dad once told me—you give 'em a fair shake: men, women, children, even animals. You give them your trust and see if they take it away. Most of the time it'll surprise you the way they'll measure up. And that's the way I felt when the pigs arrived, though along with everyone else, I wondered what kinds of houses they would build. Just as worrisome was the very fundamental, self-reflecting question of what kind of people have pigs as neighbors?

How, we collectively wondered, would we ourselves be judged? And what next? Sheep, goats, cows, armadillos, all wanting to live next door? Our kids and theirs going to the same schools?

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Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon

Collage. US Postal Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Project Apollo Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look closely at any moon landing photograph and you will find fine gray plus signs in a grid across each one—plus signs that allowed for distortion to be corrected + for distance and height to be calibrated from space as well as on the moon’s surface. That could stitch a panoramic sequence of images + plot the moon. Each Hasselblad camera the astronauts brought was fitted with a clear glass plate etched with this precise network, a réseau of stitches—pin­ning the moon to the moon to keep its surface and the vast black horizon in line. Reseau: a grid + a ref­erence marking pattern on a photograph or sewing paper + an intelligence network + a net of fine lines on glass plates + a foundation in lace.

+++

Look closely at many Emily Dickinson poems and you will find + signs that indicate a variant in a line. A variant may appear + above a word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem + stacked at the end like a solution to an equa­tion. Whole poems + sequences may be variants of one another. Dickinson did not choose among her variants, offering them as concurrent alternatives— evocative lace constellations left for us to hold up to our future sky as we try to align the wild nights + noons of her poems + epistolary impulses. Stitched across the surface of her work—plus signs that allow for + stray signals + distortion + that calibrate inte­rior vastness.

+++

Rather than the stunning aluminum-coated fabric of the Mercury crews stepping out of comic book frames of imagined interstellar travel, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in the same glaring white as a wedding dress. A color in the future that will become as synonymous as silver with the zeitgeist of sixties space-age fabrics—avant-garde apparel made of paper and metal and mirrors and all that lamé, every garment a mise en abyme reflecting and replicating a future possible. Silver and white, twin colors that wax and wane in popularity across time, reappearing again and again when we most need to transport ourselves beyond whatever present moment in which we find ourselves suspended. Colors that carry us across the thin gray twilight line that separates us from a speculative future.

Fifty years into that future, it’s difficult to undo the images of those sonogramic white suits. The ghostly bulk of the astronauts’ bodies adrift on the moon now an afterimage in our collective consciousness. The exterior garment as luminous and otherworldly every day and intimate as the era’s conic Playtex bras. Chosen in part for the fabric’s superlative heat resistance, in part because its less reflective surface kept astronauts safer from the risk of dazzling themselves with their clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight. Underneath this bright white micrometeoroid layer, underneath the layers and layers of nested silver insulation, the main pressurized body of the space suit is a simple Earthly blue.

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From Alterations by Cori Winrock

Grace Paley

 

Books are Made out of Trees

In the face of danger looming over the Old Oak and its many inhabitants, Leon, a grumpy badger, refuses to abandon his beloved book collection. Stubbornly, he remains in the Oak to read and enjoy the time he has left.

Via  Kuriositas

The Compound - Excerpt

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. 

“They had come from the hills behind the compound, south of the tennis court, slipping through a gap in the fence in the early morning. If we’d have thought to go around to the back of the house we might have seen them yesterday, slowly, slowly crossing the terrain and making their way toward us.

They were clearly exhausted: even the ones who were in good shape had cracked lips, were sunburned and covered in brown-gold desert sand. Some of them looked worse: there were three or four who had scrapes and bruises across their faces and arms. One of them, huge and hulking, had scrapes all across his chest, a gash on his leg, and an impressive black eye. I wondered if any of the boys had fought in the wars.

It was with some embarrassment that we led them to the grass to sit—they seemed a little surprised that there were no seats, but they didn’t complain. We brought them endless jugs of water and had some food ready to give them: toast with jam, bacon, eggs, bowls of baked beans. One of them lifted the bowl of beans to his face and poured it into his mouth like it was the final dribbles of milk in a cereal bowl. They’d had some supplies with them, they told us, but it wasn’t the same as real home-cooked food. It felt almost indecent, we girls rested and showered, gazing at the boys, dirty and exhausted, their eyes darting around the compound, and traveling inexorably back to us. I thought that the oldest might have been in his early thirties, while the youngest was surely no older than twenty. Even after three days in the desert they were beautiful. But we were beautiful too, and we sat straight and let them look.

“How many of you are there?” I asked, though I had counted already.

I had to ask, because it was the most important question.

“Nine,” one of the boys said. He had neatly trimmed brown hair and warm brown eyes, and sunburn across his neck and his collarbones.

One of the boys who had scrapes across his chest, who had introduced himself as Andrew, said, “One of the boys got lost. He won’t be coming.”

Yet another said, “How many of you are there?”

“Ten,” Mia said, and we all fell quiet as the boys looked at the girls, and the girls looked at the boys.

“We’ll show you around,” Candice said, getting suddenly to her feet. I knew what had motivated her into action; we all did. This was the rule of staying in the compound. It was what made people watch the show, day after day, and what people talked about during the ad breaks: you stayed in the compound only if you woke in the morning next to someone of the opposite sex. If you slept alone, you would be gone by sunrise. There were usually ten girls and ten boys to start with, but now, as the girls outnumbered the boys, one of us would be gone by tomorrow. “It’s too big a group to show around,” Mia said. “Candice, you take four and I’ll take five.”

If this plan was disagreeable to Candice she didn’t show it. I went with Candice, as did Jacintha. Eloise and Susie went with Mia. Becca and some of the other girls cleared the boys’ plates and brought them into the kitchen to clean up.

Candice took us to the west, the prettier side of the compound, where the maze lay, and the gardens and pond. Of the four boys in our group, I remembered only a few of their names. Candice walked slowly, keeping in mind the boys’ exhaustion, though they had perked up considerably, and were looking around with interest. We were showing them around like we were showing off our own property, and they were viewing it as though they had never seen it before.”

From The Compound by Aisling Rawle. Copyright © 2025 by Aisling Rawle.

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The Three Bears Sans Goldilocks

The Three Bears celebrate after throwing the old woman atop St. Paul's Cathedral in The Story of the Three Bears (1831).

The original Three Bears Fairy Tale was written by Eleanor Muir in 1831. The bears were three friends who “fancy a home amongst the dwellings of men.” Instead of Goldilocks, the Bears’ house is invaded by an old woman. Like many old fairy tales this one is gruesome enough to give little children nightmares. As punishment for housebreaking, the Bears try to burn and drown the old woman. When nothing works, they “chuck her aloft on St. Paul’s church-yard steeple.” 

The Book of Whys

Gianni Rodari (1920-1980) was an Italian writer known mainly for his children’s books. His dad died when he was a young boy and his mom was left to raise him on her own. That may explain why Rodari studied in a seminary while an adolescent. At 17 he became an elementary school teacher. This experience with children helped form him as a pedagogical writer.

He wrote“The Book of Whys” for moms with curious kids. It offers a helping hand in answering typical kid questions. You know, questions like “Why doesn’t the moon fall from the sky?” and “Why do roosters crow?” and “Why do rainbows come out after the rain?”

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(The Book Of Whys is available in English from Amazon)

A Place of Rugged and Simple Beauty

Image: Marilyn Bellamy

Excerpted from Summers in Squid Tickle: A Newfoundland Odyssey by Robert Finch:

After five days of driving and a hundred-­mile ferry crossing, I’ve arrived at my destination in the village of Burnside, a tiny outport tucked deep into the inner recesses of Bonavista Bay on the island’s northeast coast, one of the oldest-settled and longest-­fished areas in Newfoundland. The landscape is one of low ridges and archipelagos of rocky islands. These hills are the last outpost of the once-­mighty and ancient Appalachian range that stretches from northeast Alabama to the tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, the ground-­down essence of the continent. Here at the edge of the sea, they appear low and half submerged, like the backs of giant black whales frozen in the act of sounding.

Though no longer lofty, at close range these mountains are still impressive and assertive, rising in sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high above the beating surf, bare rock capped by a thin layer of soil and long grassy turf, spilling dozens of small cascades over and down narrow ravines into the sea.

I arrived in Burnside heartsick and heartsore, full of guilt and a pain I could find no release from. I had shattered one life and had not yet built another. I was far from home, and yet felt I had no home. I was in a liminal state of being—­in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, “between dreams”—­though it felt more like a nightmare than a dream. In other words, I was totally unfit to open myself up to a new place and a new set of people.

Although I had barely arrived here, I felt it was nearly time to go, and I had done nothing.

Yet I knew I had to go, had to get away and try to heal myself in a new place, an unfamiliar world, where the old ghosts could not follow me, or if they did, might become lost in new surroundings. Newfoundland seemed like a good place to go.

Burnside is a small coastal village, or outport, with perhaps forty or fifty year-­round residents, down from three hundred and fifty a generation ago. I’m staying in the western part of the town, which was traditionally known as Squid Tickle. Like many of the names in Newfoundland that strike the visitor as humorous or quaint, Squid Tickle is straightforwardly descriptive. In the center of the town there is a narrow water passage, or “tickle,” separating the Burnside mainland from Squid Island. In the old days there used to be heavy runs of squid in the tickle in late summer, which the local residents gathered and dried.

The house I am staying in belongs to Mark and Fraser Carpenter, two friends who had left Cape Cod and immigrated to Newfoundland eight years ago. In a staggering burst of sustained energy, they built the house themselves in four months, from October to January, living in a camper in the back of a Mazda pickup truck. They worked from sunup to sundown, and when they woke up in the morning their sleeping bags were frozen solid with their sweat.

Over the next seven years they operated a tour boat business in the nearby Terra Nova National Park. Last year they sold the business and were now on a voyage into Arctic waters on the Joshua, a forty-­foot sloop whose steel hull they had welded themselves in their driveway and hauled on log rollers down the dirt streets of the town to the harbor. Their enterprise and capacity for work had given them almost legendary status in the town. They generously offered me the use of their house while they were gone.

The house is a modest one-­and-­a-­half-­story Cape set on pilings with a crawl space enclosed by boards, built of native spruce and pine lumber that Mark and Fraser cut from the nearby islands. Its Cape Cod design, uncommon here in Newfoundland, immediately gave me a sense of familiarity and some comfort in strange surroundings.

When I first arrived, I literally had to burrow into the house. Since winter gales here will pry open even locked doors, Mark and Fraser had nailed shut their front door and all the windows from inside when they left, exiting through a trapdoor in the pantry and then stacking the crawl space with several cords of “junks”—­cut-­up spruce and birch stove logs. It took me nearly two hours to toss out enough wood to make a tunnel through which I could crawl to reach the hatch. When I did and poked my head up like a groundhog into the dim kitchen, I found a sweet house, tightly built, with homemade curtains pinned shut across the windows, painted wainscoting, and maps of all kinds covering the walls

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Oscar Wilde is now wecome at the British Library

Better late than never? Probably not. One hundred and thirty years after they expelled him, the British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s readers’ pass, allowing him entry to the library once again.

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