Hello! I’m Mark Taylor, a fiction writer based in Manchester in the UK. My stories ‘Dan and the Dead Boy’ and ‘The Double’ have appeared in The Fiction Desk. My story ‘All Seasons Sweet’ was longlisted for the 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.
At the moment, I’m experimenting with writing a tiny story every day. I’m also interested in the ways literature and technology influence each other.
On this site you’ll find info about fiction I publish here and elsewhere, any thoughts I cobble together about the books I read, and very occasional other thoughts.
You can email me at hello@markiswrit.ing – put “bees” somewhere in the subject line so I’ll know it’s not spam. I like bees, and people rarely try to sell them to me.
You can also subscribe to this site’s RSS feed or follow me on your federated social network of choice.
Daily stories
Flesh, in pencils, paints, or Plasticine, had always meant pink with a little yellow, the colour that outlined him and his brother and his sister and his parents. It always seemed a little odd to him, since it didn’t match the flesh of his neighbours and friends or even his uncle Den. But one day someone told him that we’re all the same colour inside, and so he thought that must explain it: people like him just happened to be the same colour all the way through. These days he was wiser, and he felt foolish when he recalled those childish ideas. But he couldn’t shake the idea of flesh as a pale and pink and squishy and elemental, made of nothing but itself, and of his own being somehow truer than other people’s.
Dead straight and faster than a diving hawk, the arrow cut through the air. It shouldn’t have. It was just a twig, unshaved, unstraightened, unfletched. The bow it flew from was a short branch strung with old yarn. But their wind was kind, and even the turn of the Earth seemed to wish the quarrel to its mark. The wish came true, and the man fell, howling. He clutched between his legs. The ground ran purple with dropped squash.
Like it or not, the dark magic of Karvhald the Soul Render is here to stay. However attached we might be to our old lives, our warm fires, the colour of the sky, the flesh on our bones, we cannot afford to be left behind. But the needs of Karvhald’s world-beating spirit furnaces must be balanced against the feelings of those whose cattle and offspring are to be hollowed out by them. So today, we are introducing a bold new voluntary code of conduct for the soul rending industry. A new presumption of consent will power up our crucial sorcery sector, while a robust opt-out process will address the concerns of parents and innocents. The future is with us, and it is Karvhald: it is only right that we bargain with him for a prosperous Britain.
Out in the vegetable patch, the boy is digging again. There cannot be so much work to do. I have kept a garden before. I used to keep this one. The plants grow themselves. He is avoiding me. He is out there turning the same soil all day to avoid his duty. It’s an insult to our generosity, and to the great abundance that spills from the earth. I’ll make him regret it. We’ll enjoy our crop alone.
“Them old truths ain’t gonna last,” she told me. She never spoke like that: she was always very proper. It made me wonder where she got it from. It made me trust her, too: because she had listened and remembered; because she herself had trusted someone who wasn’t like her. By the time I saw the hokey old film she got it from, our old truths were already long gone.
Recent posts
Wounding Ruthlessness
Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks )
There is a small, unimportant detail in Use of Weapons that caught me more than perhaps it ought to have. In hope of extracting a favour from a university, the Culture tracks down a set of wax tablets on which the legendary lost works of a great poet are inscribed. They are held in the wall cavity of a monastery, and are almost completely intact, except for three or four that have been damaged by a fire lit by a passing shepherd.