Published 'Daarke World' 1994

            "You were very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny Bobbin to the girl. Since it was the time of year when evenings were drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.

            "Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up." 

            Annabel was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her ringlets with fingers. 

            "It will be the devil's own job to untangle the silk cottons, and colour from colour.  The knots seem to be made merely by the act of looking for them."

            Nanny Bobbin tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, noodly black which the coloured strands had become.  Out came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.

            "I'll help you unravel, Nanny."

            "No point. I'm leaving here tomorrow. There'll be a newer nicer nurse this time tomorrow evening." 

            Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes.

            Annabel smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny."

            The fitful wind gulped in the chimney.  Nanny Bobbin had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. 

            Annabel had died, but was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition.  She hadn't died, of course.  She wasn't even dreaming.  She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which the lack of playfellows had engendered.

            Unlike Annabel, Nanny Bobbin was scared of the dark. She sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace.  Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious love she couldn't live without. Being besotted in both body and mind with Annabel was not very dignified, after all. She watched skeins of jet-black tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue. 

            As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime, shades of grey began to curl from the many chimney-stacks—thus a sign that at least someone was up and about, if not anybody else.  A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for some hours of the sun's shredded gold.  Annabel was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all—a playmate. or, at least, a real Nanny to taunt at bath-time, instead of the imaginary one.