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eBook Category: Mainstream/Family/Relationships
eBook Description: Shiny Things (In Nests). Like it or not, we all collect shiny things. Whether people or objects, memory or emotions, they dazzle and seduce. We build or seek nests to store them in--containers for the comfort and nurture that they bring. We change nests, construct new ones, fill them with more shiny things, perhaps the same ones? Sometimes the shiny things tarnish, lapse, their true value revealed. Brighter ones are sought or found. Sometimes other people deposit their shiny things in your nest. Attempts are made to remove them, destroy them and cleanse the space they occupied. What happens when you become someone else's shiny thing? This book is about searching, pursuing, collecting, making a home for your shiny things, and how they can ultimately find their way to betray you.

eBook Publisher: Golden Apple, Wallasey, Published: UK, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2004

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [232 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [257 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [208 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.2 MB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [236 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [249 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [260 KB] , hiebook (KML) [547 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [342 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [193 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [241 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [311 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [313 KB]
Words: 70821
Reading time: 202-283 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED   What's this?

Animal, vegetable or mineral? I sat at the table after they had gone and looked at the little pile of salt I had flicked to one side. A mound of whiteness, all crystalline and powder, but especially powder, the ashen variety you understand--free flowing into the smoke of the room. Impossible to live without. It struck me that this was the most perfect thing I had ever seen.

Events that morning had been so weird, the residue fit to bite. I was still there, shuddering as the box trundled along the track, disappearing behind curtains induced into real pleats of joy. Someone must have spent ages. Permed angels perhaps, dangling from ropes commanding the fabric to line up for their tears. It was really too flattering not to notice. I quivered as goose pimples rolled their way across my body. A sort of crowd wave, where every follicle had got it right and stood tall at precisely the correct moment. Background music played, flower arrangements flowered and I began to shudder in the most unnatural fashion. Better to put my hands together, clasp them tightly to stop them from making any noise. An organ sounded. Better to weep rather than sing?

The volume of Mother had lapsed. It chugged away from the gathering and quite obediently into the flames, leaving the living with nothing much to look at except perhaps the back of each other's heads. I sniffed at a carnation I had plucked from a bouquet and found myself staring at some carving around one of the pillars. Vigorous it was. Someone coughed. First a rawness, the kind that turns the stomach suggesting the meat is off, then, with due heat and time, the unmistakable aroma of crackling draining it's fat to coal. Mother's mass had trundled on.

But let's not piss about here. The truth was I yearned to leap up onto the shoulders of the gathering and drag those ridiculous curtains closed, swinging fully on each pleat with sweetest might, causing them to rip just enough to make the point. The thought caused me to let out a yell of immense and necessary frustration. My relatives looked startled. My husband studied the floor. I stifled the cry into my hankie, starched rigid for the occasion. How I policed my face and how I tugged the corner of that hankie of mine.