PRISTINE

Pristine had always had great soil.

Fine black deep soil that you could dig your hands into and feel like you were milling flour.

It was famous in the region and people knew that crops grown there would always be lush.

As lush as crops could be and prize winners they were too.

Yep, the residents of Pristine were rightly proud of their fertile till and the thick veg jumping out of it.

It had always been so and so it was that summer of '84, the summer the reporter came. Satz.

Satz worked for the regional paper, City Light and she specialised in local interest stories for the metropoles who wanted to read about the provinces.

Technically Pristine was so far away from the city to be almost non-existent in the region but the reputation of its award-winning harvest had even reached the sweatshop of the urban hacks.

And so it landed on Satz's desk.

"What's this?" she said, looking up at her weary boss McGruder.

"Its a story. Its local. Its interesting. Its local interest. So its yours, so go report!" he reasoned dripping coffee down his considerable paunch.

"Pristine? Where the hell is Pristine?"

"Its on the edge of the county, about fifty miles away. They're sweeping up all the local horticultural prizes round there. Its quite the leguminous sensation if you like that sort of thing. And some of our readers do, so go report it Satz!" he ordered as he wandered back to his office.

"Pristine. Sounds perfectly tedious!" she mumbled reaching for a map.

There it was. On the edge of the sheet. Almost in the neighbouring region. A tiny speck in a sea of nothing. Despite being the local interest reporter Satz hated going out of the City and its suburbs. Pristine may as well have been in Greenland!

She went home and threw some stuff in a bag. Her camera, films, notepads, pens, pencils and tape recorder. Adding a few essential clothes and toilet things, she grabbed her typewriter and slammed the door shut.

"A couple of days Satz. Three at the most. That's all it'll take to get the story including travelling by car. You'll love it, you know you will. All that country air!" McGruder had chuckled as she left the office earlier that morning.

She planned to get there late afternoon and find a room for the night. She could grab some food somewhere and start asking a few questions. The next day she would try to meet the local dignitaries among the local growers. The cabbage patch kings. She laughed at her own joke and thought it might make a good headline and jotted it down.

The drive was as lifeless as she'd feared. No sooner had she left the confines of the beguiling urban sprawl her heart wilted as the endless quilts of maize and wheat stretched out before her. It all looked the same, one crop after another, the same mundane fields jostling each other for the title of most boring cereal in the world.

Now and then she passed a cyclist, a dog-walker, a priest tending a small chapel turning to wave at her and a dead fox splattered at the side of the road eyeing her with dead retinas as she flew by.

A light lit on her dash. She needed petrol.

"Damn and blast!"

Satz pulled into a local garage about ten miles from where she wanted to be.

"Shall I fill her up Miss?" asked the garage owner, a crooked withered old man, who looked as if he'd lived a hundred years in the same twenty square yards of oil and fumes. A swarm of plump flies hung around a large fetid bone thrown down for a decrepit mutt sleeping in the late afternoon sun. The flies billowed and turned like starlings as they harried the comatose dog and bone.

"Yes please."

"Where you heading?" he inquired shoving the nozzle deep in the hole.

"Pristine."

The old man stopped pumping and looked at her.

"Pristine. Now what would you want over there?" he asked restarting the counter.

"I'm a City Reporter. I've come to write about Pristine's supposedly amazing crops."

"City Reporter eh. My advice would be to report on the city and leave the fine residents of Pristine to talk about their crops with each other and not with a nice young lady like you! A funny bunch they are. Secretive. Always up at night. I see 'em with my binoculars in the moonlight clapping. Nope, I've never been to Pristine and I sure as dammit won't ever be going to that godforsaken hamlet."

Satz looked stunned but made a mental note of what he'd said. There were some great quotes in there.

The old attendant finished pumping and scratched his scabby head. He coughed and bent double, hawking up a huge gob of phlegm flecked with blood. It landed on the gravel between him and Satz like an spilt oyster. In its centre was a fat squirming fly on its back.

"Sorry Miss, I'm not so well at the mo. It's these damn flies I think. They get everywhere. Don't mind me and my opinions either. Don't mean to scare you. That'll be a straight twenty please."

Satz shivered and paid the old fella. Driving off she thought he couldn't have long for this world. Poor sod. He looked so terribly ill. And what did he mean about Pristine. Always up at night he'd said.

The last five miles were suddenly different. The landscape changed. It was lusher. Thicker. The crops were markedly taller and sturdier. There was an abundance in the fields that was staggering.

Satz had to stop the car to look.

She walked over to the edge of a maize crop by the road and held up a corn cob. It was as heavy as a baby; weighty, succulent looking and bulging with yellow corn. She just wanted to boil it and butter it and eat it there and then.

"My God," she exclaimed, "McGruder was right. Its a regular garden of Eden out here!"

As far as the eye could see were imposing ranks of fat yields, like corn, wheat and barley, the fruit bending with the weight of the heads like rows of soldiers stooped in prayer. Strange dark clouds flitted over them in the distance. Were they birds?

Beneath the crops' shoots was a fine black till of obvious quality, a perfect sable loam from which all this glory sprang.

Satz bent down and rubbed some in her fingers. It felt crumbly like cheese and had a unique earthy smell, full of vigour and zest. There was a hint also of something she just couldn't put a name to. A sweet but rank ferrous sub-song clung to it, this soil of champions.

She was unexpectedly intrigued by this story of miraculous plenty and drove into the township with all her journalist's senses tingling.

A small roadside sign in the shape of a tractor read 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger".

Cute she thought.

Satz drove round a bit and found a room at the Pristine Guest House. She was also unusually hungry. Starving in fact and set out to find somewhere to enjoy a first evening meal.

Strolling down the high street as the sun was setting she noticed just how deserted it was. There was nobody about, not a soul.

Now ravenous she noticed a sign for a restaurant down a shadowy side street. The sign read The Last Lick. An odd name Satz thought but as long as it was open she wasn't fussed.

It was and she sat at a table in the window. She was the only guest. She snatched the menu from its stand as pangs of hunger began to pound at her belly.

Last Lick Special: Harvest Soup, Succulent Pristine Vegetable Medley Bathed in our Local Red Sauce, Best Yield Pud, coffee.

"I'll take that!" Satz said to the old waitress pointing to the special, savouring the menu's promise that you'll eat till the last lick. By now she was groaning with a uncontrollable need for food.

When the waitress returned with a steaming tray of produce, Satz was sat gripping her knife and fork with her mouth wide open. She began eating before the tray was fully on the table and trying to get a drowning fly out of the bowl she accidentally flicked some soup onto the waitress's sleeve. Satz stared at her and without thinking licked it off, flay and all.

"Delicious! The soup! It's so delicious!" Satz explained with pale hot fluid dribbling from her mouth, the fly crawling down her tongue. The waitress just smiled. With her arms folded she simply watched Satz trough the meal like a country pig, mixing starter, main, sweet and coffee together in one huge sloppy binge.

"Its so goooood!" exclaimed Satz, her mouth stuffed with veg. "What on earth do you put in the soil to make such fantastic flavours?"

"Oh, this and that. Its mostly good ploughed earth full of manure, compost, chicken eggshells and one very special ingredient" replied the old waitress.

Satz ate, asked for seconds and the old crone brought out another tray and then carried on watching. She could have been a hundred years old judging by the wrinkles on her tanned skin. Perhaps more. She stood and had time to apply some thick red lipstick to her ancient lips whilst she waited.

Satz looked up.

"What's the special ingredient? For God's sake tell me!"

The waitress gave her a huge smile of perfectly white teeth and slowly replied.

"Strangers!"

She laughed loudly and outside the restaurant the residents of Pristine had gathered and were all laughing loudly too.

Satz stared in horror at the old hag and was violently sick and puked in a bucket held out by the waitress.

The old woman looked inside the bucket in admiration.

"Oh, excellent chunder. That'll do nicely on my turnip patch! Any more?"

A maggot crawled out of her nose.

Satz spewed the last of her guts up and staring at the howling waitress keeled over from her chair, overfed, engorged and gagging on delicious food that she'd never swallow now.

Lying on the floor her distended belly stuck out like a baby and she died choking on her Pristine meal, her eyes wide with terror.

The waitress licked her lips as the rest of the residents piled into the room.

"Well done! She's an excellent catch!" guffawed the Mayor of the town as she patted the waitresses's back.

"Right, we need to get the stranger in the ground by morning everyone. You know what to do!" she instructed.

Satz's body was lifted into the kitchen were she was butchered on a mortuary table into six main cuts: head, torso, arms and legs. The blood was collected in a huge steel jug by the Mayor singing while she dipped her finger in the red grue and tasted it eagerly.

"Puuuuuurfect!" she meowed, like a cat, to which the assembled company bayed with laughter.

The six crimson cuts were then shouldered by bearers who humped them, whistling merrily, to the mincers at the edge of the main field.

The mincers hefted the severed parts into six mincing machines attached to tractors spread out equally across the edge. The Mayor divided the blood between the six, pouring it into the wide maw of each machine.

"Start the tractors!" she shouted.

"Mince!"

On this command the machines began their grisly work slowly shredding Satz into a thick scarlet tartare, which was strewn across the black field as darkness buried the light completely. The rear harrows tilled the meat finely into the soil.

The gathered throng clapped vigorously and when the tractors returned they all went to the restaurant to celebrate.

By morning nothing was left of Satz except a tinge of wetness on the dark tilth. Flies swooped over the land in frenzied swarms and stooped to lay their eggs.

A single glob of Satz's blood, a clot, had hit the township's sign, but it would dry quickly in the morning sun as the township waited for another stray.

As per normal the sign greeted passers-by with its customary 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger.' An ambulance pulled up next to it. Inside was the old fuel attendant. Dead.

The driver found himself suddenly hungry. Starving in fact.

A single full bluebottle dropped on his sweating head and rubbed its legs together slowly. The Mayor's smiling face was reflected many times in its big split eyes.

THE HISTORY OF PIXIE

Pixie arrived in the world on Golgotha ejected from an injured earth: a small thin blue waif older than sin; a slim emerald of sunlight streaked with darkness.

Pixie chewed her lip. She witnessed good and evil on that hot nailing hill and could not tell the difference.

She crouched behind the cross, a shadow on the future.

Wary of tomorrows she stole a drop of blood from beneath the tongue of the magpie pecking the wounds and squeezed a tear from a robin soothing the scalp.

She hid them beneath her wings.

As the dying sun set on this world she fled the execution. Looking back she saw night descend like a brute and a red wisp rise.

Pixie entered eons in search of fate, a newborn puck from an ancient race which had ruled the dawn forest and owned the sun's first day before Man had stood erect and cursed the land.

But they'd vanished and she was very annoyed.

She knew not where her destiny lay but had an inkling that with clenched fists she would wrestle it from the glint, the twinkle, the sinking of some unknown tomorrow. She would bathe in its splashdown. Yes.

She sought herself. A maggot in her flesh.

Pixie flew, landed, crawled and screamed a song of surging primal oaks and water slapping on the blasted shores of creation. Her blue hands weaved cradles of  anguish as she whirled and wheeled across pointless ages, her saxifrage cap soaking up her sweat under the sun's searing corona, her pointed ears piercing its petals like horns. She was a chameleon of time and place; the slang behind the platitudes; the eel in the piss.

She pushed through the legs of Charlemagne; she loped with the wolves of the Serengeti; she blew dust in the shot eye of the dying Harald and whispered in the poet's ear, "Xanadu!".

She skated on the rims of volcanoes; ran down the running mountain screes; she belly-slid along turquoise glaciers: whooshed down the curves of Mammoth tusks and dived in the dizzying drop of the Angel Falls grabbing lizards from the cliff.

But where were her damn kin?

She flew through the black smoke of Popes blowing raspberries and much worse emissions spewing from wars. Singing Tipperary with ailing Tommy's, the world remained dogged by the good and evil she had been given at Golgotha.

Pixie sat on the head of a brush in Da Vinci's pot kicking paint. She stared past the smiling Lisa toward the ripening earth beyond where the future pulled faces.

She hummed and cussed and chucked her cap. She flew off like a dot leaving the funny page.

A dunnock hopped by.

"What's your name bird?"

"Dunstable. Dunstable Dunnock at your service young Sir. And what, may I ask, are you? For, I have never seen the like before!" replied the little bird cheerfully.

"I'm Pixie, bird. And yep. I'm alone, so don't rub it in!"

The dunnock stopped pecking and eyed the angry blue sprite ruefully.

"Do you know the nature of evil Pixie?" asked the bird.

"Not exactly bird .... but I have some under my wings. It makes me hot and mean," replied Pixie.

"Do you know the nature of Goodness?" asked the Dunnock.

"Why the questions bird? ..... I think its soft and tingling against my wings if you must know. Its getting on my wick!" she replied.

"Perhaps you can find others like yourself somewhere in between," mused Dunstable.

Preening his tartan wing he continued.

" I have seen children playing together and feeding my closest friends with smiles and seed. I have also seen my kin shot by cruel men and children ripped apart by pounding canons. This is the nature of the human world, the two live side by side, as they do in you. They are in eternal struggle with each other. I sense that your fate lies somewhere between them, between sins and love."

"Thanks bird, though I'm not sure what you're on about. Sins and love!" bellowed Pixie flying up into the blue, almost invisible as she stretched her wings. She closed her eyes for just a second and an aeroplane pilot caught a hint of her grimace as she bounced off his cockpit.

"Toerag!" she yelled.

"Ice?" he wondered.

Pixie read the fading word 'Enola .......' on the plane's fuselage as she somersaulted away through its contrail.

Wheeling back through the years Pixie came to rest over sharp spires one clear sunrise.

"I'm so damn tired of flying round these stupid apes!" She ranted.

She alighted in an open window and stood upon an old desk to pause for breath. A wizened old man was writing runes and scratched his chin as he struggled for a certain word.

Pixie squinted at the old man and his runic script and without being seen scribbled 'dork' in the ink with her big toe. Rising she smudged the d and wondered where middle earth was.

She careened through the dawn air and slurped the liquor hanging from catkins. She stole hazelnuts from a family of squirrels who said go to hell. Pixie added hell to her list and soared on the thermals above the trees. She felt at home in the wild: the forests, glades, hills and scarps and saw the dark ravens guarding the edifice.

Pixie planned to bug them but seeing their massive bristled beaks thought better of it but swaggered on their ledge nonetheless.

"Hey ravens. You seen anyone like me 'ave ya?" she asked kicking a twig off the edge.

"Be cautious imp. We are the Kings round here. Speak with respect or die in our nests" the huge birds cawed.

For the first time Pixie actually felt something like fear and said she was sorry, head bowed and ears lowered.

"We have heard of imps and urchins like you in the mad dens of Men, which they call supercities. Mother Nature is not welcome there. Their wild young are caged and men murder in the alleys, slick with blood, till there is nothing left but night carrion for us!" they warned, "The wild children may know of you."

Pixie curtsied and flew off yelling "Fleabags!" when far enough away. Stupid old coots she thought. Cities. Blood. Cages. Bollocks.

She sheered wings through the solar breeze and soared above towering huts of rusted steel and glass, forced skywards from the earth like decaying inkcaps.

"The supercity" whispered Pixie.

Packs of thin unclothed children scrambled toward her as she paused on their sills high in the gas clouds, whilst deafening aid rockets zoomed to Mars and trucks landed on the rooves filled with rotting meat, which men stuffed down mincers for the kids. Everywhere was the thrum of rusted motors and the stench of corruption.

Pixie's simian face smiled but her lips trembled. Her good side ached and she was overwhelmed with sympathy. She waved back at the prisoners as they ran across shit-stained rooms to see her take off and thought she saw herself, a ragged stray, reflected in their punched-in eyes. Could these wretches be her kin, the sad guttersnipes beaten and locked up at the top of the world?

She desperately wanted to help them but these cloud-scratching towers were damned fortresses where lives were trashed and childhood seeped away in the bloodied waste running through the streets. Red Kites arced in the puking fumes and picked at the carrion of the perished.

"It makes me so sad to think of you", she mouthed through the last glazing she passed. "Bastards!"

Pixie felt her torn heart break and wished she had company more than ever as night came down like smog over the city. Alone and desolate she slept fitfully in the filthy down of a tower nest as a scheming Cuckoo came ever closer toward her, issuing its two-note lies like a mermaid.

The cuckoos suddenly became a clamour and Pixie was wrenched from her sleep.

"What the .....," she yawned as shrill alarms yelled like grieving skuas allover the globe.

Pixie followed the din and in the vast white dome of government shaking men were muttering codes of doom like gibbering wigs as Pixie entered a war room. She sensed the embittered heart of the Chief and saw his reddened finger teetering on the switch of a last terrible oblivion.

Somewhere between sins and love.

Pixie whispered in the President's ear ....

"You fat fuck!"

He whirled round to see the turquoise sprite flying round his office waving a white flag.

She zoomed out of the window into the daylight, a neon missile of the third kind leaving the old man to consider his encounter.

Somewhere a David Bowie song was playing on a videomat.

"Sailors fighting in the dance halls, oh man, looks at those spacemen go ......"

He swigged some scotch and pressed.

Pixie sneaked into a new movie plex on the rich side of the city and watched a holo-D screening of the old flick Star Wars. She saw human couples fumbling in the darkness and fans dressed as huge bear monkeys long- growling at the screen..

She nestled down in the Gods with some chucked popcorn and shouted "Shut the fuck up" at the bears.

For some reason she kipped and dreamt of the rebellion far away. Her ears pricked up when she heard Yoda whisper:

"There is another."

Pixie felt a current of charge tingle through her small body and oscillate her wings. She felt sure, like Skywalker, that there was another like her in the city.

"Oh my God," she wailed and whizzed round the cinema like a balloon above the fans.

Pixie flew here, flew there, flew everywhere and asked every living thing whether they'd seen a pixie like her.

The answer was always no. Always get away, we've no idea, no we haven't so get lost imp.

There was no sign.

But then she heard the workmen cursing the gremlin.

"Jesus wept, we've got that god damned gremlin back. The rocket doors just won't fuckin open," yelled the gaffer, "If we don't get it open and stop the timer the thing will fly. That bastard missile will take the whole colony out."

The gremlin.

It rang a bell with Pixie.

She followed the men and came to a secret building dug into the mountain.

On the vast double doors it read "SILO".

Between Sins and Love thought Pixie. She was close. Her destiny lay behind those doors.

Invisible to the guards, the handles were jammed with a huge wooden cross.

Pixie had seen crosses like it before and knew the wisp of Golgotha had followed her here, to this point, to this exact spot.

She entered the silo through the air vent and landed on a giant concrete floor.

Gremlin was waiting.

"So you made it Pixie!" he yelled, a small red goblin with bow legs, clutching a remote control.

"Who are you?" she asked standing before him.

"I am your reflection. Your opposite. I am your doom and your people's captor. I have followed you since the crosses on the hill and luckily for me I found this place first."

"And were are my people?"

"They were hiding here, like cowards, away from the bombs. I have told them to get inside the biggest missile for safety. They were happy to oblige. I shall launch it tonight and kill them all. The day of the goblin is here Pixie. Blue imps are history," he chortled.

"You red bastard," cursed Pixie as she leapt furiously onto the laughing hob.

"I've pissed in your milk blue boy!" ranted Gremlin.

They grappled in the shadow of the massive missile as Pixie's folk looked on in horror from the timer window, hundreds of them locked inside the warhead set to target Martian City.

Pixie beat Gremlin with her wings repeatedly. The good. The bad. It all rubbed off on him. Gremlin staggered and stared through confused eyes.

He pressed the remote.

SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The silo roof yawned and the missile launched on a heading straight for Mars. Pixie raced and grabbed the tailfin as it escaped the hatch. She grabbed Gremlin too.

"You'd better defuse this thing you tosser or else you're a gonner too!" whispered Pixie to the squirming red. He crawled to the timer.

"Neither good nor evil will have their day today," bellowed Pixie as they left Earth's atmosphere, a burning cylinder of magic and make-believe bound for a new world.

Pixie saluted the ejected timer as it tumbled away. This was her destiny after all.

She was sure she could hear Bowie singing Is There Life on Mars somewhere in the distance.