Me ….“Wiktionary’s definition is ‘a person who teases, taunts, aggravates, angers’”.
As organiser and chair of the scrabble tournament Bryn bristled with self importance…. and incredulity.
“Translated from Norwegian! Come-on Charlie. You know the rules.”
Using a practised left hand to flick through the T’s of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, his right hand twisted first one greasy handle, then the other, of his handlebar moustache.
An unexpectedly early inheritance: poor Aunt Hettie shouldn’t have died so early, and Janine hadn’t considered the implications. However, hearts wear out, and as a result, Janine now owned a largish suburban house and just enough income to enable early retirement from a dull, mid-rank civil service post. Janine stepped out of her job and (at last) from an unsatisfactory marriage, kicking them both aside like dirty clothing. Free!
The house had a lovely garden backing on to a small copse. There was ample time in Janine’s rethought life to take on beekeeping, two hives of bees soon making good use of the garden.
I have lived in the cathedral rafters for an endless number of bell chimes. At first I thought I’d count them to track the passage of time. It’s an enormous hunk of bronze, the bell, and every time it rings, it roars so loudly I’m amazed I haven’t lost my hearing yet. In fact, though, most of the time I don’t hear it at all; after so long living here I must’ve learnt to ignore it, and only when I was much younger did it used to wake me up on a Sunday.
Sometimes the chime of the bell is so incessant it’s impossible to ignore. When it rings to announce special occasions, so do my ears. I remember, as a child, church bells singing wedding melodies while beautiful women floated like clouds along the aisle. From this close there is nothing melodious about this bell. It only clangs.
The boardroom was silent for a full minute following Lisa’s presentation.
It was Callum, one of the Runners in the TV company, who broke the silence. “You’re the producer so you know best…” he said.
A bit over-confident for one so young, Lisa thought. But he had the good grace to blush when he spoke, which was kind of cute, so she let him continue.
“…But what sort of person would want to watch a football match like this?”
Lisa peered over her glasses and allowed a smile to spread across her face. “Exactly,” she said.
Ankle deep in thick mud, his t-shirt, jeans and even underwear were soaking wet, all thanks to the remorseless grey clouds spewing down their cold, cruel, bullets of rain.
And the ominous rumble of thunder served as a reminder that he was ideal target practice for lightning bolts.
But Samson grinned, staring at the solid structure of the library’s clocktower off in the distance. He was going to return the library book in his backpack on time.
Mum’s crying again. That’s how my days go now, thinking she’s talking to her comatose son, but in reality I’m right here, locked inside my own body, fully conscious but unable to move or speak. I braced myself for her routine onslaught of confessions as she wiped the tears from her eyes and adjusted the stiff hospital chair.
“Oh, Danny, it’s just so hard,” she began, her voice cracking. “I’m working night and day, and when I’m not working I’m cleaning. I love Mark dearly but I wish he would just once take something off my shoulders.”
Everyone said Christopher was in a good mood in the week leading up to the presentation. This sullen, moody boy, often muttering to himself now walked with a spring in his step, wore a smile on his lips and went so far as to ask people about their day.
Odd because, rarely in the three years working for the company did he speak in full sentences, usually making do with nasally monosyllabic grunts and somehow, he now spoke in full paragraphs with a happy tone.
The wind bayed relentlessly as it had for the last three days. It forced its way through the cracks and crevices to send darts of ice through the cottage.
Megan huddled under the blankets cuddling up to her siblings on their pallet in the rafters. Her grandfather lay shivering on his bed in the alcove besides the hearth. Their fire burnt low as the peat was running out. They would soon be dependent on the droppings of the animals in the byre.
Mother and father spent most of the day trying to clear a way through the snow to provide water for the animals before the water froze over again. Desperation was etched in their faces. They would have to slaughter some of the animals if the snow did not stop soon, something they could ill afford as they kept food on their table .
“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
It is notoriously difficult to swim through pancake batter, so Emmie settled for floating on her back. Her eyes opened briefly after a staccato rattle, followed by a piercing whistle, a loud bang and a cascade of spitting bright star fragments. A war must have started. Emmie was dimly conscious of being shot in the middle somewhere; blood everywhere, lots of pain. Best get back to the pancake batter. She re-submerged.
Her eyes crept open again on hearing voices.
‘She’s coming round. Are you OK love? It’s Mum here. You had us worried’
Emmie was pleased to hear this because she too was starting to be worried.
‘What’s the fighting about out there? I think there’s a bullet in my belly. It really hurts a lot and I keep falling into a thick lake. And…’
A thin ribbon of green viscosity slithers under a flautist’s door. It slides along walls and meets other slender ribbons – deep, glistening chestnut from the folk club, vivid scarlet from a classical concert in the town hall and vibrant, earthy umber from the mellow notes of Miles on a stereo. Together they dance solemnly, rising up, coiled together in a strange braid of colour and light, and then part to pursue their solitary tasks. They are creatures of great beauty and ingenuity.
He strokes the canvas. With his eyes closed, and with a gentle enough touch, he can almost convince himself that he is feeling her skin, petal-soft, beneath his fingers. How he misses the feel of her. He can look at photos, listen to recordings, smell her perfume. But the sensation of his skin on hers, that can never be revisited. He swallows the lump in his throat.
In front of him, a meticulously mixed palette of colours – her colours, matched to the exact shade of her eyes, skin, lips and hair – glistens in the hazy garage light. It is as though she is here, all the parts of her, just waiting to be put back together. The thought brings him comfort. She has not gone, not really. Not when she can be re-created again and again, each time a greater likeness. If he just keeps going, perhaps he can conjure her back from the dead. He wields his paintbrush like a magic wand. A super-power, that’s what this is. This artistic gift of his. Dare he say it, he’s a God of sorts, if you really think about it.
In retrospect, I suppose it was kind of like stepping through a door with no staircase on the other side. That’s what it seemed like initially anyway, the rush of fear, the clenching knot in your stomach that you’re dropping, the knowledge you’re going to really… and I mean really hurt yourself when you land.
Funny thing is, I don’t know how long it’s been now, but I’ve still not impacted on anything solid, and I’m not sure anymore that I’m falling, either. I look around… at least, I presume I’m doing so, but I can’t see any light receding behind me. Or one growing in front of me either, I’m pleased to report. It’s scant comfort to not be in a long tunnel with a light at the end, but I’ll take it.
I must say, it was the weirdest outing ever. I can try to laugh about it now but really, it just reinforced all my early fears about not getting into things where you can’t see a clear way out. (I completely blame the Brothers Grimm for this, what with Hansel and Gretel having such a close encounter with an oven – nightmare).
Dilly, my sister, (Delia, but she hates the name)and I live far apart so we take the occasional weekends together and meet up for hotel stays, meals out, the odd show and whatever we fancy.
Putting up the tent, Sam and Evie smiled at each other. They felt like naughty teenagers. It was to be their first music festival. Both in their forties, they had always wanted to go but life had always got in the way. With the twins off on a school trip for a week their time had come. The Hadfield music festival happened to fall at that time.
They had booked a quiet field that overlooked the stage area and had showers and toilets. The weather looked fine, so excitement was bubbling. Wandering around the main area a cacophony of sound and smells assaulted their senses; so much choice and so many people. Although they did notice that a majority of the crowd were quite young, they were determined to enjoy the experience.
The bands started playing, they wandered around getting a taste for each brand of music; some they enjoyed, others not so much. One of their favourite bands was due to play the next night, so they settled for a takeaway and returned to their tent for a reasonably early night.
It wasn’t so much that things had gone wrong, more that they were never right. So it was a great relief to get the metaphorical cards out and lay them, face down, on the table. Let us take a seat at this table, the better to understand the situation.
The first card to be turned up was Tom’s: ‘ I’m so afraid of hurting you that I tiptoe around things. I mean, I’d really love to play 5-a-side on a Saturday and have a few jars with the team afterwards. But it wouldn’t be fair to you, leaving you alone at the weekend.’
a tale foretold. ‘The crowd’s on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now.’
Touch, a so missing after trauma, so they tell us, and so I must consider you know don’t you too my mind latched on to but was it ever anything else. and indeed There is something to be said that our contemporary lives invest too much into being ‘happy,, by showering ourselves with happy smiles and emojis that become addictive self smugness of, of well of loony-bin Reality Shows for a start, making us believe that is all there is to life. and STOP us imagining alternatives. and well is writing and engaging with it – literary fiction that is – does this. So, am I here writing this to resolve and maybe dissolve lies I have told myself.? Can I then ‘face up.’, create my and your better life. Give us integrity, enabling skills, perhaps like literary devices, eh Joe?
As a writer yourself, you will know that lots of writers have given accounts of their craft. This doesn’t tend to progress much beyond the foothills of rocket science. They shut themselves in rooms without distraction, they stick to strict schedules and they eavesdrop on unwitting people. As someone slightly lacking in discipline for the first couple of points of writerly consensus, I embraced, for a while, the eavesdropping advice. And I have to say, this doesn’t always end well.
Like other writers wishing to capture ideas and observations, I too carry a notebook and pen everywhere I go. Get a small notebook – not so small you can’t fit much on one page – in an unobtrusive shade of beige, plus two biros. When I started out, I bought a pack of bright pink notebooks with ‘Britney is fab’ – reduced in Lidl – and a pencil with a pink feather on top to match. This may have seemed lacking in seriousness, and so many people commented on the pencil that it kind of blew my cover. Plus I didn’t have a sharpener. So beige and biros is the way to go, I think.
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