Excerpt: No Time Like The Present

She should have tested the lights in the first place, not now, when they were a tangled mass of wires of varying thickness, with absolutely no way of determining where one set began and another ended. Brute force pulling only resulted in cracking sounds, quiet ones indicating that the cable itself was under duress, louder ones sounding as branches gave way to the pressure.

It had seemed quite exciting initially, all that time ago, operating in the dark, no idea what the final result would be. Each bauble carefully placed, each dangling loop of tinsel precisely draped, then the grand turn on. Plug in socket, switch down. Sudden swell of glorious illumination, slight fizz of current, then enormous bang and instant blackout.

Funny how the tree had seemed to come to life all by itself: as soon as it was released from its netting, flaying spiky arms flung themselves in all directions, protesting wildly against having been scragged from a managed forest somewhere bleak and northerly. Now it seemed it was getting its revenge, refusing absolutely to reliquish its hold on the broken fairy lights. Each tug resulted in a further torrent of baubles crashing to the floor (thankfully they were mostly plastic) and if the tinsel hadn’t seen better days before this whole saga started it was certainly past utility now, not that tinsel is especially useful in any situation.