Author: David Bradley

Download the PDF of Wave Markers right now.

This is a work in progress and so far it is a hybridisation and expansion of a clutch of short stories I wrote at the end of 2020. The idea of melding them together was suggested by an enthusiastic friend who imagined my short tales morphing into something akin to Cloud Atlas (I wish). And, like a map of the clouds, wave markers could be as ephemeral and imagined…and perhaps as pointless. It’s a kind of Fenland Gothic in the “eco lit” genre, either way.

This short story expands on the journey of Madelief, a Dutch woman, perhaps from a religious order, walking through the natural world of the New Fenlands with a mission in mind, a refuge named on a scrap of bark, hidden in the folds of her clothing, and the idea of a seed in her belly. A seed that might rebuild the world after society is ravaged by disease and ever-higher tides…

You can read the latest iteration of the story Wave Markers in PDF format here for your Kindle etc. This is, at this point (January 2021) either the complete story or simply the prologue for an as yet unwritten proper debut novel from David Bradley, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve also done some additional writing in a short story entitled Remediators of the Anthropocene, which has also now been subsumed into Wave Markers.

Off-roading — a short story by David Bradley (PDF here)

Never has a hot shower been so refreshing. And, when I say hot, I mean truckstop-scour-off-the-elbow-grease hot. Was it five dollars each? I don’t remember. It was 96 degrees outside and that’s in Fahrenheit, the water inside was closer to 96 degrees on the Centigrade scale. The price, the temperature. None of it mattered. It was, if not a baptism of fire, then a scalding rebirth. It was money well spent.

It was very much a rebirth. We had followed the blue highways west and watched them grow paler as the miles unfurled beneath the seemingly unending froth of the Milky Way, one wrong turn-off, led to another, and before we knew it, it was pitch black and the Pontiac was careering the wrong way past a hairpin and into an embouldered field. It was an hour before we stopped shaking and got the car back on the road. Another hour before we reached the grease-dissolving truckstop and the chance to rinse away soured adrenalin and existential angst.

We’d picked up the car, not from Lemon Rentals, thankfully, and not from Freddie Hachiro with his tri-state limitations. It was a Grand Am, rather than a Firebird, but hey we were on a student-tight budget with only free coffee refills and Salteens to live on. And, although ‘gas’ was cheap, incredibly just about 50 cents a gallon at the time, there were no free refills for an 8000-mile grand tour of a couple of dozen of the fifty states.

Once we crossed the border into Tennessee, we had used up all our cassette tapes and discovered to our chagrin that the car radio had no FM, only AM, and all stations had only two kinds of music for our entertainment — country AND western. The deeper you get into The Bible Belt the more happy-clappy that C&W becomes. One day at a time, sweet Jesus, one day at a time.

The Grand Am took us to The Canyon. It was astonishing, if you could hover at a point directly above The Colorado River but level with its distant upper edges and look down at the raging torrent below, you would be looking down a mile and a half. Pebbles hewn from the rock by that torrent are a billion and a half years old. Those are some amazing numbers befitting an amazing sight. At that time of year, there were few tourists around, it was well after Labor Day, of course, and stepping out on to the first perimeter viewpoint to look across and down made us both draw breath sharply and laugh out loud.

We dismounted in Death Valley, it was fatally hot. There was so little moisture in the air, your cooling sweat evaporated before it even got a chance to form beads on your skin. You could so easily become desiccated in that place. We crawled in the dust, pretending to be stranded air-crash victims simply waiting for the circling buzzards to descend against the thermals and pluck our eyes. We snapped snaps with a pocket film camera, using so many of the precious 36 frames. We even strummed a few chords on the battered guitar that had been riding shotgun since our time in Gore. It was a classic with one fewer than the standard six strings and was wantonly disassembled by us red rock stars in the desert. We cared a lot.

Onwards we rolled, blue highway after blue highway, imagining ourselves some kind of pioneers chasing the gold and fearing that The Big One would stir and shake us when we found San Andreas.

It was nobody’s fault. The road ahead was no road ahead. There were no signs, only a deviation. The boulders were emboldened, the Pontiac not so much. Blood is thicker than water, they say, they don’t tell you just how hot it can run, seeping into the dirt carrying with it the last of our elbow grease.

Yesterday’s gone…tomorrow was never mine to know. Sweet Jesus.

Last Christmas by David Bradley (PDF/Kindle version here)

Funnily enough, it was four years to the day since the fourth variant had emerged. So, it was Christmas Day. Four years since the death toll passed 200 million. What a gift. Four years since the last dying embers of the theory of herd immunity had burned out and even the rich and the beyond-rich were suffering.

Four years. It’s hard to believe. What started as a very localised outbreak, with a mere handful of hospitalisations had quickly thrown the global community into panic and ultimately pandemic. The present that keeps on giving. Each genetic mutation unwrapping new pathogenic characteristics. New biomolecular tools to defeat even the strongest of immune systems let alone those that were compromised from the start. New protein shakes, new genetic twists and turns, they all side-stepped the vaccines, they all resisted the drugs, again and again.

Months and months of lockdowns and curfews, of firebreaks and circuit-breakers, had all seemed to work for a short time, the curves flattened briefly only to take on an exponential uptick within days. The powers-that-be would clamp down, and then release their grip, the bubbles would burst.

The armchair epidemiologists and the conspiracy theorists continued to refer to it all as nothing more than a really bad flu. Influenza with its all-time death toll dwarfed by that of malaria seemed like the walk in the park no one is allowed to take any more. No walks in the park, no trips to the beach, no visiting ancient castles with their riverside walks, no trips anywhere.

Everything is online for those who can still afford the gigaband connections and can still get an annual delivery slot. The uptake had been slow and there had been complaints even at the governmental level from the hedge-funders and the off-shorers that the companies really ought to pay their way. But, needs must. People had to eat. People had to have some kind of entertainment. No more close encounters of any kind, everyone in their place, it was a lonely life even for the loners.

200 million dead. An unbelievable number almost half the world’s population as it stood when it all started. There had been a time when population was counted in the billions. Those kinds of numbers are beyond unbelievable. Unimaginable.

Billions of people. Something had to snap. And snap it certainly had, if an event that lasted more than twenty years can still be called a snap. Summers came and went, hotter and hotter each year, winters were all but a distant childhood memory for the oldest survivors. Some of the rebellious youngsters had shouted about the end of the Anthropocene, the extinction of the plastic age. It had not panned out quite like that, it was a slow burn and wave after wave of serious trouble along the way.

200 million. The population at the time of the very first Christmas, ironically enough. Obviously, exponential growth has a counterpart. As one number doubles every couple of weeks, so the number of the converse halves. 200,000,000 to 100,000,000 to 50,000,000 and so on…

Bubbles burst.

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You can read my previous short stories here.

Goin’ Greyhound by Dave Bradley (Kindle/eReader version here)

Jaden leapt from the Greyhound into fetid coach-stop air that felt as heavy as a steam room but without the scent of eucalytpus oil despite this being the Northern Territory. He dashed to the gents and en route doused his ready-pasted toothbrush in tepid water from the nearest tap, and shuffled into a gap at the rankest-smelling trough for a well-earned pee, chewing on the toothbrush as he went.

“You must be German,” a fellow backpacker one splash along asserted, “only a German would urinate and clean their teeth at the same time.” The accent was Scandi…Norwegian perhaps.

“Gngnsh,” chewed Jaden.

“Aah, British, yes, a Brit would probably do that too.”

It was the briefest of encounter, with thankfully the minimum of bodily fluids exchanged, and Jaden dashed back to the bus and bounded up the steps out of the 100% humidity and back into the marginal air-conditioning. The doors hissed and slammed behind him. They waved their periodic “Seeya soon, mate!” and the bus panted north for two Creeks, a River, and headed for an evolutionary town with its netted off swimming areas. Jaden gave the toothbrush a final chew, before stuffing it into the tiniest of apportioned spaces in the pouch crammed into the cheapest of backpacks.

“Well, that was hilarious,” he laughed to his travelling companion Aimee. She had made a similar leap of faith just seconds ahead of him and had found the only privacy this side of Three Ways with a toilet seat and (unbelievably) toilet paper.

“What was?” she queried breathlessly, a five-minute stopover is exhausting especially at two in the morning with that kind of heat and humidity even if you are in your earlier twenties and out in the big, wide world for the first time.

“Oh this guy at the urinals thought I was German ’cause I was cleaning my teeth while having a pee, hahaha,” Jaden responded.

“You were cleaning your teeth and peeing at the same time, that’s disgusting,” Aimee added. “Funny though, you must have been a sight. Bit racist of him to narrow down your nationality on that basis though, isn’t it? Was he Norwegian by any chance?

“Dunno really, we didn’t have much of a conversation, it’s not really the done thing in the men’s toilets,” Jaden pointed out. “Had to be done though I think was as desperate to relieve my bladder as I was to get a day’s backpacking grime off my teeth.”

Aimee grabbed her portable cassette player, her “Fakeman”, from under her backpack with its solitary tape crammed with early R.E.M and a couple of John “Cougar” Mellencamp songs from the same era. She offered Jaden the second set of headphones and plugged in the doubler, pressing play and then quickly ripping off the headphone as a far- too-loud Michael Stipe lamented “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine”.

She slid the volume controller down from 11 to somewhere in between 5 and 6…

“I can hardly hear it now, Aimee”, turn it back up a bit,” Jaden charged.

“It’s deafening…here, you listen, I’ve had enough Fables of the Reconstruction to last a lifetime.”

“Aww, I like us listening together, it’s nice…”

“Well, I think I might just try and get some sleep, it is after 2 in the morning.”

Aimee dozed and Jaden sang along in his head, finger-drumming and foot flicking an imaginary pedal in time to the beat.

“That song’s on Document though,” he whispered but Aimee was already in the arms of the sandman. Despite the Fakeman being at 7 or 8, he too headed for a dreamy beach.

Jaden awoke to a gentle shoulder shake.

“Time for medicine, Mr Turner,” the masked nurse suggested.

Jaden brought himself up to the surface, clutching at a set of headphones that had long gone.

“Time for, time for? But, but I was listening to R.E.M with Aimee…are we in Darwin already? It’s a long way but that seemed an awfully quick journ…”

“Sorry, Aimee not here,” the nurse interjected. “Here, sit up please, take medicine, I’ve got you water.”

“I need to tell Aimee something…I can’t remember, it’s on the tip of my tongue…it’s a song, she fell asleep, it was a different album, she had it on too loud,” Jaden panicked and brushed some mince pie crumbs from in between the buttons of his cardigan.

“All okay Mr Turner,” the nurse responded. “You remember soon, don’t worry. Maybe write down, so don’t forget?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll write it down, but…but…I need to pee first…please, my stick, pass me my stick…”

On a whim, just before Christmas 2020, I wrote a very short story, originally called A Strain in Time it was a Xmas Gothic. The name wasn’t really working so I changed it to The Teastrainer. However, my friend Barbara referred to it as The Tea Lady in her messaged critique and I reckon that works better.

I then wrote another two and so had a trilogy. A fourth made it a four-part trilogy in the Rushian sense and a fifth alluded to Douglas Adams. A sixth microfiction makes it more properly a double trilogy or perhaps more properly a hexalogy.

Goin’ Grey(hound) and Off-roading are both true autobiographical/anecdotal, at least initially until the plot twists and what you thought you knew is blown away with a flick of a mouse.

The three four five six “Xmas Gothic” short stories by David Bradley are now available in PDF format for your Kindle or other device:

The Tea Lady – There’s no future in her tea leaves

After Death – A rare cremation

The Tide is High – A pastoral or post-apocalyptic world?

Goin’ Grey(hound) – Travels with a Sony Fakeman

Last Christmas – Joy to the World

Off-roading – Travels in America

The third of the stories – The Tide is High is now something of a prologue to a book Wave Markers. Chapter 1 came to me in a dream, but remains a standalone short story for now – Remediators of the Anthropocene.