Escape from Homophonia

Skreg looked at little Rhodri with tears in his eyes… well not really eyes; eyes is what you earthfolks call our assemblage of sensory organs. They generally work well …..until they don’t. Mine were working fine but Rhodri’s seem to have lost all functionality. Out of a sense of nostalgic allegiance, the partner progenitor had insisted on a name she had come across in the Incubatorium, whilst reading up on Ancestry.

“Rhodri Mawr,  father of seven children or eight, depending on the source, and distantly related on my pater’s pater’s pater’s side,” she elaborated.

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Prompt for May 2024

HOMEWORK for deadline Thursday midnight, 23.05.24.

TASK: ‘Escape’. Write 500 words or fewer about ‘escape’. Your story title isn’t included in the 500 words.

Homework to be in by midnight, Thursday 23rd May 2024.

Meeting at 1.30pm, Sunday 26.05.24, Discovery Room, 1st floor, Central library. Finish at 3.30pm.

Members: send all homework to Pat

Joiners: contact us through the Facebook Group

Dognapped!

The overnight snow had magnified all the scents.   As soon as my lead was off, so was I.  With my nose firmly to the ground, I dodged this way and that, circling and backtracking.  A new scent, rabbit, I was on a mission, tracking towards the fence and through the bushes, and then the trail suddenly stopped.  I pulled up short.  Sure enough, there was a rabbit, a dead rabbit on a length of string.  I was trying to ponder on this when I felt a sharp pain.  My legs folded underneath me.  I was thrown over the railings and bundled into the back of a van.

I awoke in a strange environment.  Along with about fifty other dogs, I was in a large cage, inside a barn.  The smell of farm animals pervaded my senses, but they were all overshadowed by the smell of fear.

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Where the Wild Things Are

It was the elders visiting for the third time this week that alerted me. The elders and the whispered words that blew across the yard, chilling my spine. “Ten cows.” “Wedding.” “Kutairi” (the cutting).

No-one speaks of my big sister, Amidah. But I remember. I remember the fifty-year-old man to whom she was promised, for a dowry of nine cows. The Ngarida (cutter). The rusty blade. The way they held her down and told her not to scream. The blood spreading over her white dress.

And afterwards, how her body was thrown into the Bush, where the wild things are. My beautiful sister. Fourteen years old to my seven. To escape the Lawalawa curse, there was to be no burial. No mention of her name.

I stopped speaking.

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