Wednesday 13 March 2013

Snelling Cornbottom

The inspiration for this little story came from an amusing interaction with someone with an amusing name. I had a mischievous idea and from that came this delightful little short story, written as an intro to a more complete work.

And so without further ado,  I present to you, "Snelling Cornbottom".





Snelling Cornbottom hated his name. His parents had been whimsical creatures who had a teapot named Eric, an iron named Peter and a child they decided, against all reason, to call Snelling. The unfortunate last name of Cornbottom was something his Father was afflicted with through the pure bad luck of being born to a proud line of Cornbottoms. Perhaps this was why his Father felt the need to pass on the injury and call his only child Snelling.

Snelling lived in a tiny flat above a bakery, the scent of warm baking bread wafting up at all hours to fill his single room, permeating the air with a friendly atmosphere and making his stomach grumble constantly. Snelling was good at grumbling, in fact it was his favourite past-time next to picking the fluff out of his belly button and adding it to his collection, stacked in neat rows of jars along the windowsill. His friends were disgusted by this habit, at least, he assumed they would be, but his friends couldn't speak, being in fact a spider that lived on the lampshade and a moth which had one night flown in through an open window and couldn't seem to find it's way back out again. He hadn't named the spider and the moth and so they were simply known as Spider, and Moth, respectively. But they were his closest friends.

Snelling himself was an old man of about 70, with a curved nose and a wart upon his right cheek, hair sticking up out of it like little spiders legs. Maybe this was why Spider hung around, perhaps he thought he had found a mate. Snelling didn't like to imagine what Spider got up to at night when he was asleep, but he sometimes woke with an unpleasant tickling sensation upon that cheek, and he would swear he often heard the odd tiny joyful squeal as a small dark shape swung off into the darkness.

Moth never seemed to care much for Snelling, in fact he seemed unreasonably enamoured with the light bulb which he danced around while Spider sat closely by, watching and hoping, but Moth had an uncanny knack of avoiding the carefully laid web.

It was a precarious friendship, founded on necessity, bad luck and not having anywhere better to be. This was Snelling's home. This is where our story begins.

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