Alice Wetherby-Pimms had a peculiar penchant for pickles. Be they sweet, sour, or dill, the child was mad about brined cucumbers. Chips, chunks, cubes, finely chopped relishes, halves, slices, spears, sticks and whole, no matter their shape, Alice craved them all.
So given the mysterious disappearance of the Pimms’s famed horticulturist Horace Hornby, one would expect her new governess to have jumped at the chance to avoid a similar end with regard to the child’s transports of delight, instead of ignoring what Alice deemed the grand theft of a not so grand cuke. Indeed, the ruckus which ensued over a petit cornichon – an ordinary gherkin, at that – was hardly worth giving it the time of day. Or so it seemed. Continue reading
Once upon a dreary Sunday many Mays ago, it was unclear whether Alice Wetherby-Pimms had quaffed the dregs of a liter of 
webs of spun silk billow
They say the day Aunt Frankie married Uncle Sally was a day that would live in infamy. I’d learned Franklin D. Roosevelt said that when Pearl Harbor was bombed, but no, most of the family, actually, only the uncles, would whistle, smack their wine stained lips, and speculate over the reasons as to why a raven-haired bombshell like Francine Odessa would be interested in a stunad* like Uncle Sally. As for the women in the house? They’d wink at one another.
Because our minds are not confined to the constraints of our craniums, a ride down the rabbit hole can be endless with its twists and turns, zigs and zags, steep climbs, and plummeting tumbles into a time-sucking abyss. You’re familiar with it, I’m sure.
She stands facing the pale, windswept bay, tall and erect as the ancient redwoods poking through the shroud of fog folding over the mountain range behind her. They loom in the distance like a pack of protective brothers, chanting in the blustering gale, You’re not alone. We’ve got your back. 
Extreme weather boots.
Alice Wetherby Pimms physically felt time pass in the coursing of her blood for as long as she could remember. Every second -tick, tick, tick- was like an invasion of needle-nosed imps nipping at the underside of her plump flesh.
Donna Gwinnell Lambo-Weidner 