A World of Mud

This is a short fragment I've written for the Grainery Lane writers group. (This weeks theme is 'mud'.)


Lieju lay in bed dreaming about things made from mud. There were an awful lot of things made of mud. Mud houses and mud castles, where mud people went about their mud lives. Mud birds flew across backdrops of mud clouds. Mud fish* swam the in muddy rivers and seas.

Then Lieju woke up.
Thank goodness it was just a dream, thought Lieju. Imagine if the world really was made completely of mud! Stuff would be falling apart all the time, or drying out and getting all crumbly...
Then he remembered that the world really was made completely of mud.**
Oh dear, he though, with his muddy, clay brain. Not very sensible, mud.

As usual, Lieju had dried out considerably overnight. He’d developed a thin, crusty skin, which made his movements rougher than normal. Nothing, however, that couldn’t be fixed by a short soak in the tank.
Lieju peeled himself away from his bed (they’d become somewhat attached), crossed his roughly spherical, mud-carved chamber and climbed into his corrugated mud tank. Lieju sighed as he sank into the cool, murky water. Beneath the surface, he used his hands to knead his flesh, allowing the water to soak right in. Once he was done, he stepped out of the tank. He didn’t want to go runny.

Lieju climbed out of his chamber, into a hallway of Gyttja, which was currently the the Regat of Ierde’s largest fortress. Until two weeks previous, Maapera had been the largest, but an unexpected mudstorm had considerably diminished it’s grand towers.


* These often got sloppy.
** This made air tricky. Not as tricky, however, as in a neighbouring universe, which was made entirely of ham Ray Charles.