No Strings Attached: Quorn

He closed his eyes and remembered.

"Come on Mr. Pudge! Silly old thing!"

She pushed him into a chair and poured the tea.

"Now eat your biscuit all up!"

It was Sue-Marie who was being silly, but the quorn was not allowed to tell her. He had to be quiet, because that was the code which all quorns lived by. They never spoke. Never. Ever. And when they were offered food, they had to pretend to eat it.

Sue-Marie wiped the quorn's mouth and patted him on the head.

"You've been a good boy!" she said, "You've eaten all your food. Now you can play!"

She ran across the wide, green lawn towards the garden and put the quorn down in the sun. He sat as still as he could while Sue-Marie skipped and danced about. She left him for a moment to pick some white daisies, then she dropped them on his head. The petals fell like stars.

"You are my best, bestest friend!" she said, hugging him hard.

The quorn remembered all this. He sat in his dry shelter, while the winter closed in around his tree, and rain pelted the forest, and he remembered. Would she ever come back to the homestead again? Would she ever think about him?

As he wondered about these things, he heard the sound of a car. It was coming up the hill towards the ruins. The quorn walked to the entrance to his dark, musty cave and brushed the spider's web aside. He could not see the car yet, but he could hear it distinctly. It was labouring up the old, weed-blocked driveway.

But many cars had come this way over the years. Sight-seers, tourists, farmers, they had all driven this way. A real estate agent had come too, many times. The same property had changed hands three times, since the fire.

The quorn remembered that night, when smoke began to fill the bedrooms. Sue-Marie's mother had come, screaming, into the room, throwing the bed sheets aside. The quorn had been tossed from the bed, on to the floor. Sue-Marie had coughed, called for help. Her father had picked her up and carried her away, into the darkness. And all the while the roaring of fire had grown louder as the house burned.