Short Fiction

Denton

Denton belongs to a hyper-mechanized future where his old-fashioned tastes and romantic attachment to Elizabeth Mwres mark him as an idler and a misfit. His polished accent and soft hands make him an easy target for the rougher men around him, and he discovers that his code of honour demands more courage than he ever suspected he possessed. His struggle to earn a place beside Elizabeth drives the story's early conflict between personal desire and a society that prices everything, including love.

Ugh-lomi

Ugh-lomi lives among a small, fearful people who scavenge and hide, but his imagination reaches toward the powerful horses on the plain and toward Eudena, who watches him with fearful admiration. He stalks the herd with fern-fronds in his hair, half in sport and half in wonder, revealing a mind bolder than his tribe's and a body still learning its limits. His willingness to approach what others flee marks him as the story's engine of change, and his bond with Eudena sets the tribe's suspicion against them both.

Eudena

Eudena moves through her tribe as a silent figure of watchfulness, tolerated but not powerful, her days spent observing the burrows and the grazing strangers Ugh-lomi longs to join. When the spiteful old woman seizes little Si, something new stirs in Eudena, and she strikes back with flaming eyes and runs toward the lion's lair rather than away from it. Her sudden defiance and her devotion to Ugh-lomi make her the emotional centre of the story's early flight and pursuit.

Mr. Ledbetter

Mr. Ledbetter is a clergyman-schoolmaster on a much-needed vacation at Hithergate-on-Sea, where he falls into whisky-fuelled talk about the vanished days of bravery and the burglar as the last true adventurer. He deplores the security that has made his own life stagnant, then walks out into the moonlight doubting whether he would truly welcome the risks he claims to envy. His self-comparison between his safe pedagogy and the imagined life of daring sets up the comic and unsettling turn his holiday is about to take.

Mr. Fotheringay

Mr. Fotheringay is an unremarkable shopman whose mind is not complex enough to be paralysed by the strangeness of what he can do, and so he simply experiments: a raised candle, a match willed into being, a glass of water turned pink and then green. His first scare gives way to pride in his singularity and vague intimations of advantage, though he has no idea what to do with such power. His blundering attempts to fit miracles into the routine of Gomshott's and his own small life drive the story's central comedy and its quiet menace.

Elizabeth Mwres

Elizabeth Mwres is the daughter of a man who holds her securities in trust, and her romance with Denton is conducted on borrowed money and old-fashioned tastes — quaint Victorian furniture, real printed books, a child nursed at home rather than sent to a creche. When her father's interview and a moneylender's reckoning leave them with scarcely a thousand pounds, her white face and her glance around their beloved rooms show how much she has staked on this life. Her refusal to conform to the customs of her age makes her the emotional anchor of the story's early domestic arc.