Read The Valkyrie for Free Online Page A

rather
enjoyed public transport as humanity is at its worst and best when
confined in small metal tins with their fellow passengers. Getting
on the bus to the high street was her favourite thing to do bar
redheads and cocaine. Liberty sat pride of place in the seat –
according to the sticker anyway – reserved for the elderly or those
people with small children on their persons at the front of the
bus. From there she could see all of the highs and lows of limited
human emotion upon their faces as they got on the bus, tapping
their adorable little oyster cards as they went.
    A woman with
straggly hair and baggy purple parka with a fur trimmed hood was on
her way to Morrison’s. Liberty looked at her and using her
abilities saw her trouble. Susannah, the purple parka person, was
in the process of divorcing her husband Mitch. Mitch had met a
dental hygienist in a Wetherspoon’s – on curry night incidentally –
six months earlier and had left her. This had unsettled Susannah
and Mitch’s only child Dan, who was studying for his GCSEs. As
things stood Liberty could tell that this would set the lad off on
a spiral of destructive behaviour, but this was not yet set in
stone and Liberty could influence the situation and set him on the
straight and narrow. She looked again at Susannah and decided that
what was really necessary in this situation was for Susannah to get
a bloody good haircut. A nice bob wouldn’t rectify the situation
but it would make things more aesthetically pleasing for Liberty’s
third eye. Susannah, Mitch and Dan all had the freedom to fuck up
if they wanted to and that was how Liberty left them: with only
themselves to blame for the whole mess. There was no divine
intervention on the bus that day, well apart from Tony & Guy’s
Sergio and his deft hand later that afternoon. That man was very
talented with a pair of scissors and a can of hairspray, it was a
goddess-given gift, and everyone knows that a good haircut will
make almost anything seem a little less awful. Besides all the
mortals ever begged for was the liberty of choosing their own
destinies.
    Liberty rang
the bell. The bus pulled into the stop right at the bottom of the
high street and she scampered off, not waiting for the woman with a
buggy to take the break off the back wheels, as any good soul who
suffers from queue anxiety would have done. Liberty always got off
a stop earlier than she needed to. She walked past the shops taking
in the changes that had happened over the past fifty years. Gone
were the greengrocers, the fishmongers and the butchers, wholesome
scenes that would have been at least recognisable to a mortal from
two thousand years ago and here were the bookies, the chicken shops
and the pound shops. She kept walking for a few more minutes before
she reached her usual destination, a Save The Children charity
shop. Liberty found charity shops bewildering. Here was a store
filled with things that people had bought and hadn’t used or no
longer wanted being sold to raise money for a cause. Did the
mortals not realise that if they did not over consume on these bits
of crap and instead redistributed the wealth they would have
wasted, then they could have eradicated the disease that the child
in the poster was suffering from decades ago? Did they not see the
humour in it all?
    Liberty entered
the charity shop and mooched around the paperbacks. There were
seventeen copies of Fifty Shades of Grey on the bottom shelf. She
thought they should send them to the orphans in Syria and they
could use them for kindling. That was the most practical
application for them. She then prodded around the clothes, glanced
at the bric-a-brac before she started trying on those hats that
mortal women buy for weddings that obscure views and act as a
safety barrier against leering best men. She was wearing one
particularly ugly monstrosity, when she saw the real purpose of her
visit enter from pricing up figurines of shepherdesses out back:
Nora.
    Nora was