Liars' League

Rowly's Rabbit by Graeme MacFarlane

Dec 09 Rowly's Rabbit

Read by Paul Clarke

The rabbit was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt about that.  Dead as a door-nail, dead as the dodo ... But Rowly had no desire to continue the Dickensian litany of what the rabbit was as dead as: it was dead, and it was Christmas Eve, and he was half-cut and wholly in despair.

Rowly had bought the rabbit last night, on a whim, as a gift for Betty, who'd done what nobody else of his wide and varied acquaintance had wanted to, and given him a bed over Christmas after he'd been thrown out of Mrs. Pandry's lodging-house for non-payment of rent. Admittedly, Betty was away was visiting her parents in Somerset over the festive season; but that, Rowly felt, argued even more strongly for her sweet-natured charity in trusting him.

Lillia in the Whale by Rebecca Swirsky

Dec 09 Lillia

Read by Elizabeth Bower

She is Lillia, addicted to ice, hungry for its tip-tap-toe coldness, stuffing ice-cubes in her mouth, getting high from their ice-cold sweetness. It is summer, when the rank heat of the sun pushes down on the earth that so it must gasp for breath. Closing the curtains Lillia speaks on the phone to a man whose hearty tones are too warm. Afterwards, she runs herself an ice bath.

Two days later as requested, an industrial freezer arrives, long and white like a snow-covered plateau. The men who install it wear a thin film of sweat, skin browned by summer rays. Lillia does not offer tea or coffee, but sets out glasses of water in which cubes clink pure notes. One of the men takes a gulp, then sets it back on the counter looking at the unplugged kettle. But Lilla is already climbing the stairs. Sliding between the white sheets of her bed, a tray of ice-cubes next to her, she is held tight in the gleam of an arctic landscape. She becomes polar bear, shaggy pelt of a coat protecting her as she searches for plump seals in ice-pools. Eventually she turns into the form most precious, her cheekbones etched from sharp slivers of ice, her Giacommeti-thin body crackling with ice-secrets. She is buzzing with glacial tenderness. There is a knock on the door. Downstairs, they are packing up.

The Icicle by C.T. Kingston

 Click to play THE ICICLE

 Read by Allie Croker

Once upon a time, in a far-away desert kingdom, there lived a prince, the darling of his people: strong and tall, with skin golden as the shifting sands, and eyes black as the desert night. On his twenty-first birthday a magnificent feast was arranged, and chieftains and merchants and artists came many miles to honour their young lord.

The occasion was magnificent and the guests giddy with wonders, but as the prince entered the dining hall he gasped again. A beautiful woman stood before him, quite naked, quite still. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen, and the strangest; for her smooth, slender body was glistening and transparent, as though made of the clearest glass.

Pain Relief by Magnus Nelson

Dec 09 Pain Relief

Read by Kevin Potton

 

Mum loved Andrew Lloyd-Webber. To me, that was always disappointing. But then, Mum read The Daily Mail, so it wasn’t really a surprise.

‘You watch X-Factor,’ she’d said.

‘Completely different - that’s ironic.’

‘Everything is,’ she said. ‘With you.’

I think of Mum a lot here. When they play Puccini on the radio, O Mio Bambino Caro (Mum only knew it as a song from a film) I listen on the plastic headsets they give out on the ward. I try not to think about hospital-acquired infections.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics by Terry Pearce and Deborah Rosenblum

Thermodynamics

Read by Jennifer Tan 

She feels no communion with stoves or fireplaces; the fires there are tame things, anaemic and bland. It's not the patterns in the flames that draw her, though they twine into answered prayers and dreams as she watches. It's not even the way fire destroys, although there is a part of her that finds some satisfaction in that. For Phoebe, the thrill and the rapture come from freeing the beast. Its hunger is fed by her own, its wildness is joined by hers and she feels part of something ancient and primal as she wields its power. And, it consumes. At first, it consumed small things: the contents of bins, small patches of scrub, a sack of clothes left out back of the thrift store. In time, these weren't enough. It wanted more, she wanted more. A barge, half-sunk and abandoned in the shallows of the river. A pile of tires out the back of old man Tooley's scrapyard. Watching as the smoke rises in a dark column from a field of barley, she basks in the glow and the heat.

Jethro by Ellen O’Neill

Dec 09 Jethro

Read by Lucie Howard

Ol’ Jethro, he’s tall as a grizzly and twice as ornery. Like to died the first time he walked in my door, stooping so low his nose scuffed the floor, beard like a broom sweeping it clean, just so’s his head wouldn’t bang against the top of the door frame. Would’ve pulled the whole house down if he did that. He’d come in, all scrunched up like, stuffing himself into my ol’ comfy easy chair like it’s a toy one – you know, like in little Addie’s doll house, the one her daddy Joe made her when she turned six. Just before Joe died, that was. Anyway, that’s what he looked like, Jethro, when he’d come to visit – a giant in a doll house. Had the bellow of a lion been done wrong – least got his tail stepped on. Yep, tall as a grizzly and roar like a lion, that man.