People sometimes ask me – where do you get inspiration for your stories and poems? Often the people who ask that aren’t creatives (but not always). I’d assume other creatives would know, or at least understand what a fickle mistress the muse is.
Inspiration is strange, at least for me. Either it comes, and I get poked by stories, scenes, characters, ideas, words until I write, or nothing. Nada. Zilch. And it can pop up any time – often just when I’m not in a position to write (in the bath, in bed, at work) and I have to jot something down or hope I remember it for later. There’s not one specific thing that inspires me – everything, nothing, nature, news, other stories, random thoughts zinging about in a neurodiverse brain.
There are a few pointers though – mostly chatting with my best friend, whose also creative and loves storytelling. We laugh or grumble about something and one of us will say, there’s a story in that… and sometimes there is.
I recall, several years ago, we had a conversation about all those times random socks appear or disappear in the laundry, why I can never find things, why some days stuff gets dropped or broken and you can’t remember doing it. Thus was born the Kitchen Imps.
My late father was a teller of dark fantasy tales (although he probably wouldn’t have classed them as fantasy) and I think, a lot of the shorter stories I write come from his influence. Plus fairy tales, mythology, news, history, music, art, nature…. See what I mean.
The excerpt featured below was one such story born from the ‘there’s a story in that’.
The Secret Kitchen – from The Kitchen Imps and Other Dark Tales (c) A. L. Butcher
The strawberries cackled in their glass jar, around them were other, older condiments – sweet pickles, jams and spreads. Snickering, they shuffled forward, moving close behind a jar of elderly pickles. The pickle jar shuffled forward to make room, butting up against the sugar tin, which refused to move.
“I get used every day, thus I need to be within easy reach,” said Sugar, rather arrogantly.
Pickle grunted and edged further forward. “It not be me, it be the jam,” it sighed. “It be shoving.”
The strawberry jam hopped sideways along the shelf, looking for an easier target, and spied an old jar of sauce, dusty and forgotten. The lid was crusted with elderly tomato, dribbled along the glass and faded to musty brown, with a little sheen of furry mould. Untouched and unloved, it cowered next to an empty salt cellar and a dried-up mustard pot.
The shelf was narrow and overcrowded, and the strawberry jam looked down with a wicked gleam. It was much narrower here than the Big Shelf in the place where it had lived before the Hand had plucked it from its comfortable repose. The jam vaguely remembered the huge Mother Vat, from which it had been born, and many others with it, until the God Spoon had appeared and housed it in the Glass Jar so it could look out upon the world. The strawberries did not question what had been given to them; life in the field before this was not life, merely an existence. Jam! Jam was true life! Jam was purpose!
Shuffling and shoving, the jar slid in the grease which coated the shelf. With a mighty push it toppled the unfortunate sauce down to the flagstones far below, a gleeful chuckle shaking its lid. The bottle smashed and the elderly sauce splodged out its life upon the floor. As the wicked guffawing echoed in the quiet, midnight kitchen the other jars and tins shuffled closer to one another, hoping for protection.
The giant door opened, and the owner of the Hand entered the world of the Kitchen, seeing the poor sauce all over the floor. She looked around to find the culprit, for this was not the first ‘accident’ in recent weeks. The strawberries in the jar looked innocent and nodded towards the sugar, laying blame where none was due.
Once the remains of the sauce had been removed, the Hand grabbed the sugar and angrily deposited it at the back, leaving a nice space for the jam to move into. As soon as the owner of the Hand had gone, the jam, who was young and new, speedily pushed aside the other jars and settled triumphantly into the empty space, where it could see the world it was planning to conquer. Such a sweet, sweet world it was too.
The Kitchen Imps and Other Dark Tales – six short tales of mayhem and mischief.
Winner of the 2018 best fantasy on NN Light Book Heaven.
Naughty imps, missing socks, cunning thieves and baffled gods feature in this collection of short fantasy fiction.
Universal Link https://books2read.com/KitchenImps
Library of Erana 