Posts in category: Hardware

It was probably her finest work, in the end. It was her Mona Lisa, her Creation of Adam, her Statue of David, her Ninth Symphony. This would be regarded as the greatest creation – the masterpiece – of Mavis, although she supposed nobody would ever know that she had done it.

Nobody had ever created finer wallpaper, as far as she could tell. It was bold, calming and – dare she say it – it was pretty. If this didn’t meet the criteria set out in the very short letter, nothing did.

As Mavis went back to the entrance, she took a long moment to admire her work. It had come so naturally to her, this design. Perhaps somewhere deep in her subconscious, she’d seen this design before, because surely she couldn’t have come up with something so brilliant on her own.

She supposed there was a bit of imposter syndrome at play in her mind. This hardware shop based in Cheltenham now had a brilliant design, and she simply couldn’t accept that she’d made something beautiful today. It had been too easy. Wasn’t a masterpiece supposed to be hard? 

That was the thing about Ascending, in Mavis’ experience. The job didn’t become a job anymore. There was something weird about that. About working so hard for years and years, then being given magical powers that made it all effortless. Others embraced this power, but they had actually earned it.

Maybe Mavis would have felt differently if her powers hadn’t come to her so easily.

She sighed, trying to imagine happy construction workers coming to this hardware store for building supplies near Cheltenham, remarking about how incredible the wallpaper was. But the delusion brought her no joy. Perhaps that was why she’d be happy for nobody to know it was her work – that way, nobody would ever know how much of a fraud she was.

It was much better that nobody know about the wallpapers of Mavis van Westerly.

I’ve been living in a cave for the last twenty years and kind of missed this whole ‘internet’ fad. Last week, however, I was out on my normal shopping run when I saw someone drop their phone. I picked it up and ran over to them, telling the young lady what had happened. She looked down at the object and frowned. “Oh, it has a crack in it. You can just keep it,” she said. Me, Homeless Tom, with a portable phone device? I took it back to my cave and worked out how to charge it using a potato and a couple of wires, and now I’m catching up on everything I’ve missed. It really wasn’t that hard to find high-quality electrical supplies close to Cheltenham, where my cave is located. After setting everything up, I decided to start a blog, which is apparently a thing people do online.

I’ve been getting into this online shopping thing as well, which helps because now I don’t even have to leave my cave to get cool stuff. I just hope that the delivery people can find ‘Mossy Cave, Cheltenham”. I bought a drone online yesterday, and I can’t wait to get a good view of the area surrounding my cave without even stepping outside. This Wishes website has some quality stuff, so soon enough my entire cave will be full of awesome things that I can blog about. I just hope the quality is as good as they make it seem. But why would anybody lie on the internet? I’m absolutely loving this new internet life. Thank you entitled girl from the Hampton hardware store! 

I think the most interesting thing I have bought so far is the statue of a king, which is made of this cool steel that is rusted turquoise. It gives it this really unique appearance that I think will look amazing at the front of my cave. I can’t wait for it to get here!