Municipal Misgivings

Dustmen

The dustmen come every Friday.

Residents put their trash out the night before. We neither see nor hear the bin men, but the Council

ensures our refuse is taken to the dump next to the old Art Deco cinema.

I saw Old Lady Slippers and her ancient husband in the new movie at The Gaumont this week! They disappeared months ago.

Fridays: bins are collected, gates are pulled to, and the town is cleared up.

Lollipop Lady

Here come the little darlings. And here comes round and ruddy Evie Trotwood, magician; long black wand topped with red and fluorescent yellow roundel screaming ‘STOP’ across its middle.

She, the sanguine sentinel of tidal drifts of children, ushers them across the road, then abides. High tide is from 7.30 every morning, Low tide from 3.20 in the afternoon. Under her watch, all drivers must stop. And if they don’t?

Evie takes care of them.

Christopher Bean

My first published work is the story ‘Jumbled-up Jack’ in The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel (Woodbridge Press, 2016) anthology (See Cemetery Dance review here). Since then I’ve had several flash fiction pieces published by Haringey Unchained, some of which are included here. My first long-form, Victorian horror novel The Pegge and the Pendrel is finished and looking for a home. I’m working on companion books set in the same universe, designed to be read in any order. I started writing in 2009 focusing on shorts and awkward, wretched little things that were too long to be short and too short to be novellas. On Bluesky, not Twitter.