Phil Sloman is a writer of dark psychological fiction. His first story was published in 2014 and he has been writing ever since. In 2017 Phil was shortlisted for British Fantasy Award Best Newcomer for his novella Becoming David, and was part of Imposter Syndrome from Dark Minds Press shortlisted for British Fantasy Award Best Anthology in 2018, and edited the 2020 British Fantasy Award shortlisted anthology The Woods. Phil regularly appears on several reviewers' Best of Year lists. Phil’s latest collection, No Happily Ever After, was released in May 2023.
Author website: https://www.philsloman.com/
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phil-Sloman/e/B00TIUH9UW
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Phil-Sloman/e/B00TIUH9UW
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phil.sloman.77
Twitter: @phil_sloman
Email: phil.sloman@yahoo.co.uk
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Opening extract from my short story 'The Teddy Bear’s Picnic' which opens my latest collection No Happily Ever After.
The Teddy Bear’s Picnic
I went down to the woods today.
§
There is a clearing in the woods behind our house, where I go whenever I need to think. It is a short walk from the back of our house, across the mossy lawn with its abandoned toys, and then along a well-worn path which is either muddy or dry depending on the time of year. At present it is dry. The path is wide enough to fit the pram I use for my bears and dolls with its oversized wheels and canopied cover. My mother tells me the pram used to belong to her mother, who I never met because she died of cancer before I was born, which is a terrible, terrible thing – the cancer, not my birth - and that the pram is an antique so I should be more careful with it, but then what is its purpose in the world if no one gets to play with it?
Today I am wearing my favourite dress, the one with the birds flying round and round and round in such a happy way that it makes me wonder if I could fly. I tried to fly once before. It was a warm day, a day like today, and you could smell the honeysuckle on the trellis. The flowers were wonderfully sweet and heady and reminded me of hugs and kisses and friendship. Most of the pollen clung to me as I climbed up to the roof, my hands all yellowed and sticky. I remember that I left an egg-yolk smear of yellow on the white cotton of my dress so it seemed as if the birds were flying across a beautiful sunrise. It looked oh-so pretty. Except mother was not pleased, but then she rarely is.
Our house is a big house, one of those ones where there are more bedrooms than people, and the roof is this wonderful maze of chimneys and windows. From the rooftop you can see for miles around, across the treeline of the woods at the back, out over the fields and beyond the river which marks the edge of our land. I often wish I had a brother or sister who I could go running across the fields with or we might go fishing in the river together, feeling the cold water running over our bare feet as we pluck sticklebacks from our nets. We’d play hide and seek, and roll around laughing in the freshly mown grass until our sides begin to hurt and our jaws are in danger of falling off. But that isn’t the case. There is no brother or sister. Only my friends, and they are in no fit state to go running around or otherwise.
That day, I had put some nice plump cushions on the ground in case anything went wrong. Flying is a tricky business and I have often seen baby birds lying dead on the sun-baked earth where their efforts have failed. I would take their small broken bodies to the shaded part of the garden where the rhododendrons dwarf everything around them and the soil is soft and damp, enough so that you can dig a tiny grave with your bare hands. I once asked Mother if the worms will eat the birds in the same way the birds will have eaten the worms when they were alive. She slapped me across the face and told me I shouldn’t talk about such things.
I pulled a leaf from the honeysuckle and threw it into the air, watching as it drifted slowly down to my wonderful audience. It was made up of my friends who were all terribly, terribly excited to watch the show. We had been talking about it for days but the weather hadn’t been quite right. Either too wet, which would ruin my dress, or too windy—and I didn’t want to get blown away like a crumpled leaf. That day had been perfect, almost like today. They were all there that day except for Sue, who had a cold and needed to rest up in bed. My audience were positioned just-so on the lawn with Mr Brown Bear at the back because he is the biggest and could easily see over the heads of the others. The twins, Tilly and Milly, sat together because that is what they always do, and the others arranged themselves as they saw fit. I was worried the sun would be in their eyes as they looked to the lip of the roof from where I was to make my big entrance but it didn’t seem to bother them. Not even Mr Hoppity, who had lost one eye several years ago.
I waved at them, blowing all of them kisses as they waved back at me. It was all hugely exciting and I couldn’t wait to talk with them after I had landed safely. I was able to picture it so clearly. I would take a running jump, no more than five or six steps, launching myself into the air with my arms spread wide like wings. We had all spent many days sitting watching the birds in flight around the house and over the woods: dunnocks, starlings and pigeons, all with their own way of gliding through the air. My favourite is the woodpecker, who flaps and flaps then tucks its wings tight to its body like a torpedo surging through the skies, dipping briefly in the way a skimmed stone will skid on the water, before flapping its wings once more. Of course, that was too advanced for me until I became more practiced; that day I was happy to copy the more basic glide of the wood pigeons with their oversized bodies and tiny heads.
I waved at my friends and they waved back at me, waiting diligently as I counted my steps back from the edge of the lip, setting my feet firmly on the flat rooftop as I readied myself. And then the chanting began from below, my audience reeling off the numbers from ten to one just as we had practiced, the words as clear as a bell in my head. “Ten… nine… eight... ” I breathed deeply, thinking only of the task at hand. “Seven… six… five… four… ”
“Emelia Fitzgerald!” The voice came from behind me. “What in the name of all that is holy do you think you are doing? Get down from there right this minute!”
That was the voice of my father. It always puts me on edge, mainly in the way that it is usually unexpected, and it was no different then. Father spends most of the time absorbed in his papers – work or The Times – and has little to say to Mother or me other than passing comments about our appearance or what we could have done better in some way or other. Except today he was fiddling away in the upper floors at some sort of nonsense. Whatever it was, he happened to glance out the window at just the wrong moment. A few more seconds and I would have been flying free on the breeze to the adoration of my friends.
Naturally, my audience were disappointed that they didn’t get to see me fly, but that couldn’t be helped. They are my friends and they understand these things happen so we agreed we would try again another day. Except Father took down the trellis with the honeysuckle – which upset Mother terribly as it was a favourite of hers – and that put an end to my ideas of flying.
So instead I get to wear my dress on days like today and dream about what it would be like to soar up high with the birds and maybe sit on a cloud with them for a rest while we watch all the people below, who would surely look like ants as they hurried from one place to the next.
§
I didn’t go in alone.
§
The pram is packed with my friends. I was careful not to disturb Mother when wheeling it out of the house. She is having one of her illnesses. She is never to be approached when she is incapacitated in such a way. That is when she bites. She gets all snappy and snarly and lets me know just how much I have ruined her life before taking a sip of her ‘medicine.’ Mr Hoppity tells me that I shouldn’t let it bother me but it does.
As always, Tilly and Milly are hand-in-hand at the back of the pram, whispering secrets to each other. They think no one else can hear them but they are wrong. I can hear every hushed word as we trundle along the lawn with me hunched low in case Mother decides to take a peek out the window. Some of the secrets are about what Father gets up to with his friend when Mother is not around. Others are less interesting but they keep the twins amused.
Mr Brown Bear is content to sit in the middle, surrounded by his family, who are more what Father would call long-distant relatives than proper flesh and blood. The first is Sue. Yes, she is named after the celebrity. Sue adores Mr Brown Bear and would spend all the time in the world with him if only he would let her. The second is Tiny Ted, whom Mr Brown Bear secretly sees as the son he never had, and he dotes on the little chap as any father would; or most, anyway. The third is Sebastien, who lost his arm many years ago, but we don’t talk about that because it always makes him sad.
Humpty Dumpty sits towards the front of the pram. He is what Father calls a stout fellow. He was also the one most concerned when I was going to demonstrate my flying ability. It is understandable, though. He has a fear of walls and falling but I told him he could look away at any point if he felt at all scared. In the end, it didn’t matter.
And then in pride of place is Mr Hoppity. Mr Hoppity is the oldest and wisest of my friends and has been with me since I was a baby girl. His fur is now a dirty white instead of the bright snow-coloured flannel it was when he was much younger. He says that it is fine and it is just a part of getting older in much the same way that he only has the one eye now. There is a puckered hole where it used to be. We talked once about getting a patch for it but he would have none of it. “Be proud of your scars, Emelia,” he said to me, and that was the end of the matter. I still think he would look good with a patch, though, dangerous like a pirate or one of those foreign spies from the films Father sometimes watches.
“Onwards,” he yells as we wheel our way towards the rhododendrons at the edge of the lawn, which marks the start of the woods.
Once we are among the rhododendrons, in their shadow away from the prying eyes of Mother, we stop for a moment to pay our respects. This is where we buried the fallen baby birds, where I told you the ground is soft and moist. It is quiet here and the dark green leaves of the overhanging bushes make things seem serious and religious. This is our chapel, where we come when we have questions we do not want to ask Mother or Father. It is also where we bring our offerings. Above the graveyard, which we have marked out with tiny crosses made of lollipop sticks and thick garden string, is where we hang the presents we have made in our bedroom. Tilly and Milly are in charge of colours and beads. They like the bright ones and the ones which sparkle when the early afternoon sun catches them. Tiny Ted and Sue also help out with the gluing, even though Tiny Ted once ended up with more glue on him than on the presents. Mother took a pair of scissors to him that day to cut away all the sticky fur and now he is bald and patchy in places.
I have brought two offerings today as it is a day when we will need luck on our side for when we go into the woods. The first is a dead mouse we found on the kitchen floor. Tabitha, our cat, and also the reason Sebastien only has one arm, had left it for us as a present. There was a mess of blood on the tiles where its stomach had been torn open, and the body was still warm to the touch when we picked it up. We cleaned everything away before Mother and Father came down, then washed and dressed the mouse. It was Milly’s idea to put the dress on it. She said it would hide the wounds and make it look alive again. So that is what we did. We tried to put some string around its arms so we could hang it from the bush but it was too tricky to tie things properly so we agreed to tie the cord around its neck. Mr Brown Bear says it looks like a public hanging now that we have put it up, but Mr Hoppity says it does not matter as it is the thought that counts and the woods will be happy with what we have given them. The second offering, we took from the graveyard.
In the kitchen there is a bottle of bleach which Mrs Hodgson uses when she comes round to clean for Mother and Father. We took a bowl and filled it until the bleach was just below the rim. Mr Hoppity reminded me to wear those big yellow rubber gloves Mrs Hodgson uses. He said all the skin and flesh would burn off my hands if I didn’t. I put them on after we took the corpse from its matchbox coffin. The hatchling had been yellow and purple when we first found it, before we put it in the ground, its eyes bulging and blind, its body featherless. Mr Hoppity said a cuckoo had probably pushed it from its nest, making it yet another unwanted child in the world. When we dug it up, it had been in the earth for so long that most of its skin had come away, leaving a tiny skeleton dotted with patches of dried meat and fat. It sank slowly into the bleach, small bubbles forming around the corpse. We left it for most of the day, long enough for a small pile of waste to form at the bottom of the bowl.
Milly and Tilly had put small beads in the skull where the eyes had been. The jewels were golden and beautiful and glowed like fireflies when you saw them in the right light. That was all Milly and Tilly did with the skull. They said anything else would have been too much. And they were right. It was perfect.
The ground gives a little beneath me as I kneel to hang the bird above the mouse, offering a little prayer as I place our bone-white angel in pride of place so that it is flying high for the world to see.
The woods will be pleased.
§
Beneath the trees where nobody sees.
§
Humpty was the most nervous as we went deeper into the woods. He was always the one who worried. “There’ll be lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” said Humpty. Mr Brown Bear was quick to point out that he himself was in fact a bear, as were Sue and Tiny Ted and Sebastien, and lions and tigers were some of his best friends and had been for many years with no problems whatsoever. That shut Humpty up for a bit so we carried on regardless…
(C) Phil Sloman 2023