Fearing the Wrath of the Mistress.

I’m agitated again, but only because I’m trembling with trepidation. The problem is that I’ve only written two blog posts since the last time the Mistress of Mill Lane graced me with a visit. I say ‘graced,’ but it’s really a matter of keeping the peasant stock on a tight rein. If I don’t make at least five posts a day, she yells at me.

‘Where’s my bed time reading?’ she shrieks through a pair of blazing eyes set in a visage terrible, reddened and fearsome with the blood of anger. ‘Write!’ she commands. And then she calls me names like ‘great flake of festering fishcake’ and ‘pathetic slop from a slimy slurry pit.’ She’s endlessly inventive with her insults, and devastatingly creative with her alliterative acumen.

The real nasty, though, is the thing she hits me with. I don’t know what it is, but it’s heavy and wet. She stands behind me and aims for my right ear; and then I feel the shockwave, reel under the blinding headache, and slump sickened over my desk to the echo of something going ‘slosh.’ And ‘slosh’ again.

And then she cackles... ’Tis a terrible, enervating sound that has me longing to be swathed in chains and cast into the deepest of the dark dungeons without sustenance. It is at least quiet down there, and merely cold.

Until the next time I fail...