Christmas Crackers

Then she looked up at him, clearly worried.

He looked down at her, broke her gaze and nodded to himself.

‘You know what,’ he said at last, taking a deep breath and glancing up at the ship.

‘You have decided to stop your travels.’ A statement of fact.

‘No.’

There was a pause.

‘No?’

‘No. Take your wishing machine and Fnghhhh– ’ said Donnie, his rising fury momentarily short-circuited by the presence of a young child nearby. ‘Frak…frog…’

His eyes clenched shut as his brain tried to work out another way to say what he dearly wanted to.

‘Go away!’

Lights blinked on and off on the surface of the ship.

‘How dare you blackmail me,’ he declared, now off the subject of minors and profanity. ‘How dare you offer an end to my pain and of my sister’s for this kind of price!

‘How dare you!’

The ship wobbled, the voice now silenced.

‘You can cure us, you can cure the ills of this world yet you want payment,’ he yelled. ‘You want blood-money? You want to withhold this for your own selfish ends?! You want to profit from our misfortune?!’

Donnie’s anger reached a crechendo and he stood, surprisingly even-footed. He raised his right hand and extended the middle finger.

‘Screw you! You can help everyone yet you hold it back and lord it over us, over me!’

He sat down slowly, drawing furious breaths and focussed his anger.