reprobate \REP-ruh-bayt\ noun
Meaning
1 : a person foreordained to damnation
*2 : a depraved person : scoundrel

He was the filthiest little reprobate one ever would see. His muzzle was covered in mud, and slobber dripped down the longer hairs. You could track his exact path across the carpets of the house, and even one spot where his tail had knocked over a vase, carefully poised on a table edge. The rest of us were so well behaved; he was giving us a bad name. At this precise moment he had his feet up on the piano, apparently trying to plonk out a tune he'd learnt somewhere. Enough was enough, he had to go. Fortunately it's quite easy to get rid of another dog, because humans always assume they've simply run away. The difficulty is when and how to do it.

bedizen: to dress or adorn in gaudy manner.

It was quarter to six. Beneath my bedclothes I felt the distinct frustration of not being able to settle myself back to sleep. I pulled the eiderdown up over my head once more, and curled up into a ball, for one last attempt. Nothing.
Deciding it was a lost cause, I gave the eiderdown a quick kick. My foot slipped out and caught a blast of cold. I retracted it back into the warmth of my cocoon. Rubbing my eyes, I allowed the chinks of light to reach my brain, and waken it, like the fluorescent tubes turning on in an office building. Flicker, flicker, off for a moment, then full on, bright.
With nothing better to do with myself, I trotted off down the hall to my aunt's room. She had not come home last night, and this was one of those rare moments where I got to play dress up. I slipped my hair back into a ponytail, and prepared to open the wardrobe, with a "hmmph". This was a moment mixed with solemnity, excitement, and urgency. The door thwopped to one side, too heavy for me to keep a grip on. My hands plunged into the delicate fabrics, prying through them like jungle vines. I let my fingertips seek out the items I would adorn.
Five minutes later I was bedizened in the oddest concoction you can imagine. Then, on the stairs, I heard a footstep. Shit.

popinjay: a vain and talkative person

"You sound like my mother," he said, laughing at me. Everyone else starting laughing too. Even those who weren't in our little group turned and smiled. Their eyes stared at me, but I could only see his. The scintillating blue was unbearable, witnesses to my soul.
"Why must you be so hateful?" I retorted. "You are the vilest creature in the world."
"You little popinjay. I see you strut about the place, wishing you were just a speck of what I am. But all you could ever be is my mother, my bumbling, moronic mother. Next time I'm in town I'll be sure to give her dressmaker your card."
I loved him so much.

chevron \SHEV-run\ noun
Meaning: a figure, pattern, or object having the shape of a V or an inverted V: as a : a heraldic charge consisting of two diagonal stripes meeting at an angle usually with the point up *b: a sleeve badge that indicates the wearer's rank and service (as in the armed forces)

I ran my hand down the chevrons on my jacket. Ever since I had joined the army in the Spring of 1942, I'd been deeply miserable. Now, with a dishonourable discharge hanging over my head, I can't bear to leave. My mother and father had been killed in the blitz three nights before, my sister is still out in India, and Michael, the only other person I've loved, is dead, hanged. Everyone says he'd killed himself, but I know he'd never have done that. They did that to him. They'd have done it to me too, but they didn't want to bother themselves. They know leaving me alive, alone, will hurt so much more. I tried to get into his room to take something to remember him by, but they wouldn't let me. I still have a handkerchief he gave me, but the smell of him is leaving it like a waterfall. They'll give his clothes to someone new, a fresh recruit into this, some poor young boy. War isn't brutal, humans are, regardless of the time or place.

uxorial \uk-SOR-ee-ul\ adjective
Meaning: of, relating to, or characteristic of a wife

Bernard Fothring was a simple man, of simple needs. He rose at half eight, had his breakfast at half nine, and left the house at half ten. He ran his life by a simple, steady routine, and he remained content. Never enthusiastic, never depressed, but always content. His wife was quite a different matter. She ran a sporadic gamut of events every day, each little drama more dramatic than the last. Even the way she referred to her husband changed daily. Sometimes he would be darling, or pops; at other times he was husband, or Bernard. Even the way she said Bernard changed. This Monday it sounded distinctly like Burn-hard. But on Tuesday it was Ben-urd. Everyone assumed it was because she was French, but even in her little hometown she was known as quite the oddball.
Bernard Fothring put up with these uxorial ramblings and confusions, though, much to the bewilderment of everyone. When asked whether his wife vexed him, he simply replied that he did not mind. It left his family, his friends, his servants, and his neighbours utterly confounded. But, then, they didn't know about Bernard's boyfriend, Marco.

pullulate \PUL-yuh-layt\ verb
Meaning
1 a : germinate, sprout b : to breed or produce freely
*2 : swarm, teem

You sit covered in germs. At every opening they sit and wait, waiting for the moment you're at your weakest, when they can make their attack. Either side of your mouth is a warty growth. At your nostrils sit endless soldiers, in spite of everything you put out to remove them. Each crevice and crack pullulates with them, growing and feeding, splitting off from themselves to spew out more. These villains will rape and ravage you for their own benefit, never realising that the day their happy host perspires will be the day they sign their own death warrant.
You are Earth. They are Humans.

esemplastic \es-em-PLAS-tik\ adjective
Meaning: shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole

In the great and mighty cosmos it was up to someone to bring all the disparate particles together. Until that was done, no one could create the important things in life, like mocha, and squeaky dog toys. So God was invented. I say invented; he was actually picked from a list of hopefuls as part of a reality show: Idol Idol. He didn't have the best esemplastic powers, but he was easy on the eye, and then, if not now, looks were considered to be pretty important. The PR department wanted someone to be the face of the new 'Universe' (a name they were bandying about), and, with some careful words in the ear of the judges, they got their way.

shibboleth \SHIB-uh-luth\ noun
Meaning
1 : catchword, slogan
*2 : a widely held belief or truism
3 : a custom or usage regarded as distinctive of a particular group

I have long been of the opinion that women do not necessarily have less intelligence, just that they choose not to use it. I have known a number of very intelligent women, but when their husbands, who were much stupider than them, had an opinion, the women would stick to it, even if they knew it were wrong. Many consider this proof of their shibboleth, and fair cause for shutting up their women. But in all my time as pastor of the parish, I've never known anyone so clever as Mrs Wilson. So it was strange to me to find her standing over the body of her husband, a shotgun in her hands. She looked so calm, I could sense nothing but a great peace in her, a peace she had always been in conflict to reach.

neophyte: a novice.

Susan's hand slipped. Her body lurched forward. And she fell face first into the mud. It was by sheer chance that the cow didn't trample over her little body. Tears mixed with the soil and excrement on her face, as the little boy behind her began to laugh. She was a complete neophyte when it came to milking, doing anything on a farm at all if it came to that, but he didn't care. Billy was still fractious with Susan, because he'd been forced to give up his room for her. She hadn't asked for his room though. Right now she wished a bomb had squashed her flat in that last raid, then she wouldn't have been taken off by that horrible evacuation officer, and brought to this hell.

nefarious \nih-FAIR-ee-us\ adjective
Meaning: flagrantly wicked or impious : evil

The yoghurt was nefarious, wicked in its temptation, evil in its succulence. How could I resist? Fortunately, the man sitting opposite me was deeply easy to turn down. After seven solid evenings of 'first dates', I was ready to return to a life of dinners for one, cats, and slobby pajamas. Without the cats. Damn allergies. Each man had his own charm, his own lack of charm, and his own buzzer that rang out "Not in this lifetime". I hoped they felt the same about me: disappointment seems fairest when it's equally shared. And I feel bad letting people down. I struggled through my dessert, trying desperately to enjoy it without giving the wrong impression. My desire was for the bacteria, not him. Perhaps it was wrong to suck on the black cherry.

lucre: money; profit

Jimmy dreamed of one day becoming a gangster. He'd seen all the big films. Well, at least the bits his mum and dad would let him watch. He knew all the things to say, to women, to men, to your cat. Not many gangsters had cats, but Jimmy did. He called him FatCat. That would make up for him being a cat, and not a violin case, Jimmy thought. Jimmy had wanted a violin case, and his mum had let him borrow a friend's. She was horrified to find Jimmy had taken the violin out and left it in the garden, in the rain. Jimmy didn't understand why she was so upset. There wasn't much lucre to being a violinist; a gangster on the other hand...

hummock \HUM-uk\ noun
Meaning
*1 : a rounded knoll or hillock
2 : a ridge of ice
3 : a fertile area in the southern United States and especially Florida that is usually higher than its surroundings and that is characterized by hardwood vegetation and deep humus-rich soil


The morning sun was barely touching the sky, a sliver of gold creeping across the tiniest cracks of trees, leaving the rest of us in shadow. We were crouched behind a large bush, awaiting the order from our captain to attack the enemy, who were on the other side of the hummock. Gethran and I could see the tops of their helmets. We held our breath, the dewy mist catching at the back of our throats. In the branches near my face, a bird hopped about, trying to grab at the last berry on the bush. I watched it struggle for a moment, before falling down. It stayed still for a moment, having finally noticed me, and our eyes locked. Then it flew off and was gone. I heard one of the enemy soldiers say something about it. Gethran's shoes twisted in the dirt, eager to be on the move: soon the sun would be up, and our cover blown. I pulled at the sleeve of our captain, trying to convey our urgency. He brushed me off. Then his hand slipped to the floor, and he made the signal: three fast slaps on the floor. In a moment we were off, spreading across the hummock like children running from their mothers.
I made a swift blow to one of their heads, and he fell.

defenestrate: to throw out of a window

It's a conundrum: do I defenestrate myself, or slowly defenestrate every other person in the world one by one? A super-human-mind-ray power could get them all to do it in one big go, but what about people on the groundfloor? Or in the basement? Plus I couldn't kill off the babies. I'd keep them and train them as a new super-human army, to take on the squirrels. You just know after I'd killed everyone the squirrels would be in there. In your business suit, riding the elevator to your office. Having meetings in the conference room, getting your PA (now another squirrel) to get them coffee and check the diary. Meeting your wife (another squirrel) and telling her you're (squirrel) too tired for sex. So with super-baby-death-ray power we will have to fight them back.

copacetic \koh-puh-SET-ik\ adjective
Meaning: very satisfactory

It was little wonder Julie lashed out at the airhostess. Her entire life she'd been telling people things were copacetic: her haircuts, her food at restaurants, the way people trod on her feet on the bus. She'd pacified herself right into an aneurysm, for which she was now having to fly one thousand miles for an operation. She wasn't sure if the heavy beating in her head right now was the little clot preparing to explode and kill them then and there, but she did know that the coffee she'd just been given was awful, the cup cracked, and her skirt ruined. Enough was enough.
The air hostess was about to tell her passenger that if she shouted then it would be harassment, but she thought better of it, as she met Julie's steely gaze head on. A silver-dagger torrent was waiting behind those corneas, just waiting for some idiot to unleash its fury.

exiguous: extremely scanty

"I told Mariana, I said to her, 'You can't chuck that exiguous trash down the runway'".
"Jerry, what the fuck are you on? Where do you come up with this? Exiguous?"
"Babydoll, I read it in the freaking Times, a political piece on Dafur. If it's fucking good enough for them, it's good enough for me."
"And what did Mariana say?"
"Well, she's Russian, so she didn't get it. She thought I was saying 'sexy dress trash'."

forte \FORT\ noun
Meaning: something in which one excels : one's strong point

All about the town she was known, and loved, for every day she brought a smile to the faces of each inhabitant of that little hilltop place. Even the people of the valley couldn't help but be charmed by her. She whistled sweetly wherever she walked, with a step so gentle she could have trodden on a snowdrop without damaging its spring. The breeze seemed to follow her like a lost puppy, and the sun shone wherever she was. Yet her real forte was the little crafts she made, gifts for all she knew, made from whatever she found on the hillside.
Now it was Easter, and she spirited the milk from six cows, to make chocolate for the eggs she would make. Each had a little letter carved into it, and was wrapped with a yellow ribbon. They were so beautiful, even little Bobby McGrew found it hard to eat it.

obfuscate \AHB-fuh-skayt\ verb
Meaning
1 a : darken *b : to make obscure
2 : confuse
3 : to be evasive, unclear, or confusing

"I don't understand," she wailed, watching his figure recede into the night. She stood there watching the space he'd recently departed.
"Of course you don't understand," said a voice from behind her. "Explanation obfuscates everything, where the laws of dark-matter trade are concerned."
She didn't turn to see who it was. She knew not to trust the faces of anyone she met here. They were so easily bought on the blackmarket, you might speak to the same person half a dozen times a week, and see them with a different face each time. Whatever he looked like, he was a member of the Ginferdu police.

verdure \VER-jer\ noun
Meaning
*1 : the greenness of growing vegetation; also : such vegetation itself
2 : a condition of health and vigor

Heather piled down the mountainside, resplendent in verdure. I stumbled through it, each trip and stumble pulling me down into the undergrowth like quicksand. Just days before I'd been tackling the sprawling urban jungle, and now the stupefying countryside was swallowing me whole. The sun warmed it, and me, like a fleshy back cooking on the beach. My body lurched forward, half wanting it to swallow me, to die here and have it all done with. In all this air I was struggling to breath, so far away from the clogging smog of London.

cacophony: harsh or discordant sound

I always associate Spring with a cacophony of birds singing out from a great big tree, sprouting out buds of flowers and leaves, and pulsing like a giant heart. But where do you go to get that many birds. Nowadays I feel blessed to hear a thrush, or see a little robin. Mankind cut down the tree, broke the heart, and sent the birds flying. Then it shot them.

"Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"

wanderlust \WAHN-der-lust\ noun
Meaning: strong longing for or impulse towards wandering

Her heart sat in her throat. At any moment she would meet her idol.
"Is this your first time?" The boy next to her was sneering. She didn't like him. She never would. They'd never met before, but she could tell.
"Yes. I take it it's not yours."
"I've been here dozens of times." An arrogant smile crept across his face, like pee spreading across the floor.
"Well. Maybe you've forgotten how exciting it all is, then. I'm loving the rush."
"Wanderlust, that's what you've got, plain and simple. It's sadly really. I never had it. But then I never had a lot of those useless things little girls have.
He raised the tip of the foot at the end of his dangling leg. Her mother had told her never to trust men who crossed their legs. Her mother was an idiot.

matutinal: relating to or occurring in the morning

You sit at your desk, the soft leather top running beneath your finger tips. Your mood is entirely matutinal: sluggish, expectant, anxious. At any moment the Bishop will arrive, and he will be questioning you. As far as you know you have done nothing wrong. And, yet...
You reach out to grab the letter. It is crumpled, has sat in your pocket for days, then more days beneath this pile of papers, here. You have hidden in from the world, and from yourself. What are you ashamed of?
Mrs McSelwyn is at the door. He is here.

cozen: to deceive or obtain by deceit.

The land was rife, rife with loathsome creatures, each sucking the lifeforce from whatever they could. An apocalypse is a terrible thing to waste. A wasteland is the breeding ground for all sorts of flesh-tearing terror. Old cans are torn open by knives, or even bear hands where the flesh is weak from rust. Everything has its contents gouged out, ready for consumption. "Devoured till death" is the epitaph on the land's tombstone. She was tricked into it, her gifts cozened out of her by her own true love, her babe, her progeny.

magniloquent \mag-NIL-uh-kwunt\ adjective
Meaning: speaking in or characterized by a high-flown often bombastic style or manner

I wanted to kill her. I wanted to take her head and bash and bash and bash it against her stupid fucking laptop. I couldn't possibly focus on my work with her there, talking on the phone in that magniloquent way, raising her voice at the middle of every word. She tossed her hair back. I imagined grabbing hold of it, pulling her backwards on her chair, it crashing to the floor like a fallen horse and rider, and tieing her hideous locks to the arm. There she'd be, ready for a good kicking.

glower \GLOW-er (the OW is as in "cow")\ verb
Meaning: to look or stare with sullen annoyance or anger

The old man's head furrowed, deep lines slipping over one another, downward and downward, like icing slipping off a cake. He glowered at the man, who, in spite of being significantly taller, younger, and fitter, seemed to shrink beneath it. Mr Faulks had always been used to getting his way, and now could win any fight by the simplest of methods.
"I'm very sorry," the young man said. Though he was not sure why he said it, since it was Mr Faulks who had trodden so plainly on his foot.

potable: drinkable; also, a beverage, especially an alcoholic one.

"Shut up, you fat trout," she yelled at her across the bar.
"It's time to leave," the small, bespectacled barmaid replied. "Your husband's waiting."
And so he was. The poor man was clearly useless at dealing with his wife, which was probably the only reason they were still together after thirty years. His face looked like a worn doormat, with a thick bristle across the middle, and curly tufts all the way around its edge.
"Jesus, Sharon, your sweat's potable," he said, veering from her at the same time as grabbing her at the elbow. "How much has she had?" he asked the barmaid.
"I don't know. I only got on at eight, and she was pretty well gone by then."

hirsute: covered with hair or bristles.

I lay back on the pavement, blood clotting around my eyes. A gentle tingle rumbled all over my body, back and forth, up and down, like a million pixies beckoning me into the darkness. The drizzle swelled over me, drenching my clothing milimetre by milimetre. A snuffling sound started at my crotch, pushing in with wisps of air. It traced its way up my limp collection of flesh. A hirsute nose reached my face, jabbering out its sniffs, before one deep sigh. The dog paused.