Write on Wednesdays 24 - choose your own exercise.

Due to my crazy schedule, I've opted for the short and very sweet one-liner exercise!

Write On Wednesdays Exercise - A Great One Liner... This week you need to come up with one good line to describe a part of your day. It can be 'real life' or fiction. But it must tell us 'who did what'. It has to be an amazing line, like a tiny little paper plane that must travel a big distance (figuratively speaking) with only a few folds ... Every word in that line must earn its place, or be cut as excess baggage. Let's get thinking about each sentence as though every word counts, like working one group of muscles to show how much weight they can carry.

And here's my attempt...

Rachel wedged one of her glittered fingernails deep under another, managing to flick unsubstantial cake crumbs to her poodle, while telling me I’d lost my job.

Write on Wednesdays, Exercise 23

We are learning to make fire.

Aron shook his head. It's not fixed, his eyes repeated to me yet again. It was a look that was beginning to define him, here on this moon.

As I stared out the window into the black soup of space, my mind became an instant reflection of it. I shook myself to think clearly.

The atmosphere control has nothing wrong with it - according to the computer's voice as it blurted at us in the wrong language. Lately I've had to reset it to English several times a day, so that both of us can understand when some kind of warning message erupts. I didn't change it this morning. I don't know why, I just got sick of it not working. The broken atmosphere control trumped all other potential disasters on this tiny base. If we can't breathe, we are soup.

The computer blurted another foreign warning in the same soporific tone, as if we are hearing we are about to die from a learn-a-language program. I bashed open the computer panel and yanked the power out for the voice command.

"Say something, Aron."

The stress set in my face like stone, and he knew what I was asking. He smiled for the first time today, but I still could not.

"We are... learning to make fire." Aron beamed with gentle triumph, but then a single, thick tear ran down his cheek.

His words did not do what I had hoped.

I gazed down at my pajamas. Aron looked over at the coffee jug still waiting to be made. Soon, our eyes became drawn to the flickering oxygen guage. We stared, de-focused, as the needle dwindled from orange into red.

Write on Wednesdays, exercise 20 - 'I thought I saw...'

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 20 - Write the words " I thought I saw" at the top of your page. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write the first words that come into your head after the prompt. Don't take you pen off the page (or fingers off the keyboard). Stop only when the buzzer rings! Do this exercise over and over if you wish. Write beyond 5 minutes if you like, you can link it up as an extra post.

I'm so glad to be able to do another WoW piece. With this one, my aim was to explore self-doubt, which I feel the phrase ‘I thought I saw’ captures so wonderfully. If anyone is keen to find out, I don’t actually know if my character is right or wrong. J 

I was more interested in exploring her emotions and her choice of actions revolving around her self-doubt. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to give me some pointers – even down to punctuation. I haven’t edited this one very well due to time constraints, but I must admit I went beyond the five minutes... tee hee hee!

I thought I saw...

My fingers massaged the inside corners of my eyes. Surely it must be twelve-ish, I thought. Another involuntary giggle escaped my lips - Ted was on fire with his quips and comebacks tonight, and the raucous laughter from the others sparked a second wind in me. I blinked open my eyes to see the wine glass in my hand come slowly into focus. It had been empty for some time; nothing but a faint sticky red ring at the bottom and a few colours of lipstick on the rim.

I put the glass down on the splattered table cloth, stretched my knuckles, and thought about calling a taxi instead of walking home. On the long table, stacked plates were shoved to the side, where bare elbows propped up ruddy, beaming faces. Nina returned to her dining room, tears of laughter streaming down her red-hot cheeks in fine lava trails. All she could do was wave the jug of coffee at us, while she dabbed her eyes with her other sleeve and sighed. She had heard Ted from the kitchen, and she didn't mind at all that her fiancé was poking fun at her again. I thought - this time - though she gives as good as she gets, he was a bit unfair. I couldn't help but dart my eyes through the archway to the living room. Lucy was in earshot, having scampered down the carpeted stairs in her kitty slippers. As usual, it was well past her bed-time.

Drawn back to the table, I rejoined the conversation. Soon I was chuckling again, and my eyes watered effortlessly - for no reason, really. It was automatic, from seeing tears on a dear friend's face. Maybe it was just too much red wine and a very long day. Where was my phone? On the side table in the living room, I remembered. I peered through the archway again.

The most dreadful feeling rose through my nerves, so intensely it was as if I’d been lowered into another atmosphere. My whole body locked up, to the point I was afraid to turn my head for fear my neck would snap. My flagging eyelids widened into hard circles, only to see the whip of Lucy's long, red hair as she ran up the stairs. A man sat perched on the edge of the sofa. I struggled to remember his name from earlier that day. Was he a good friend of Ted and Nina? It was all I could helplessly think of.

But how should that make a difference to what I think I just saw?

"Coffee?"

I looked up at Nina, but her voice became lost in the vacuum of space that formed around me and bulged against my ear drums. A shadow fell across the room from a source I couldn't detect.

"You look like you've seen a ghost!" Nina said, without a care in the world. I wanted to cry. I was going to throw up. She squeezed my shoulder, too hard - with the grip of someone who doesn't realise how much they've drunk. She moved on to the next person beside me at the table.

I glared past Nina's lightly swaying form. Everything - right down to the weave in the fabric of her skirt - was completely vivid to me now. The stray cotton sprouting from the seam at her hip appeared as epic as a solitary tree on a hillside. Beyond it, my vision held the man just as sharply. And he had discovered this; I was now making him feel uncomfortable. I dropped my gaze to my arms in my lap, where they had remained the whole time, flattened and heavy like two sunken battleships.

Was I just seeing things? What exactly did I see?

No matter how many times I framed the question in my mind, I felt no conviction in my answer - I just didn't know for sure. You cannot be wrong about these things. I grew insatiably thirsty for something. Not water, certainly not alcohol. I just needed to know.

Surely I must be wrong. In fact, you could easily be wrong, I berated myself. If that was the case, I wanted to rewind the last few minutes, to have kept my eyes closed instead and not risk being so ridiculously, cruelly mistaken.

Coward.

I took a deep breath and steadied my voice. "Nina... what's your friend's name?" My words came out in the tone of a complete stranger, and I coughed to shake myself out of it. She looked over her shoulder to where I indicated.

"Oh - that's Matt. Remember? Ted's workmate. Why?"

"I've gotta go. I'll drop by to pick up my phone in the morning, okay? We’ll chat then."

Her neck shifted abruptly backward and her face screwed up in confusion. I let her trail after me as I walked to the front hall.

"Oh, alright…” Nina said, and then came up with her own explanation as we both reached to open the door. "You look... utterly exhausted!"

My lips pushed upward into a shallow smile and fell flat again.

"Do one thing for me, Nina. Go upstairs and check on Lucy."

"What? Why? What do you mean?"

"She was downstairs, a moment ago..."

Nina breathed sharply in, and as her eyes searched mine for some kind of context, I struggled to think what I could give.

Instead, I turned away. Feeling sick to my stomach, I knew that another second of looking into Nina's eyes would eventually feel like a lie of some kind. As I walked down her front path, my heightened nerves still felt the hard tug of her hand on my shoulder. I just needed to step back and think clearly before I said anything, I told myself, and prayed it was the right thing to do.

Nina called out into the darkness, her voice now sobered with apprehension.

"See you in the morning… and have a good sleep."

A Great One Liner... Write On Wednesday

This week's exercise over at Ink Paper Pen is to come up with a single sentence that packs some punch by describing a part of someone's day and telling a story [fiction or non-fiction]. *EDIT: Seeing as it's a quick exercise but a very helpful one, I've added a couple more.

I gripped the metal handle of the factory door and my knuckes instantly froze to it, just as I imagined my father's always did.
~
Lisa agreed with her mother that the sewerage drain outside the front door was an issue with her new flat, but a far more pressing one she loathed to mention was the door key glistening in the trickling, putrid water below.
~
As usual, I'm open to criticism, but please try to stick to the one liners. ;)

Max and his Incredible Underwater Adventures

Max wasn't here, in the grocery store, to steal the apple. He picked up a fine, glossy red one; good enough for Snow White, good enough for him. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the other apple, the one his mum bought only minutes ago before he dropped it on the ground outside. If only it had just rolled across the asphalt, and not down into the cold stew of fallen leaves and the wrappers of yummier things. 

Mr. Tucker popped up from below the store counter, appearing like a highly detailed sock puppet. His lips tut-tutted stiffly, and Max imagined the grocer's mouth was controlled by a giant hand. Not a real one, perhaps a holographic hand. But the man's eyes didn't move from any giant holographic fingers. Instead they seemed flat pictures of themselves, cut and pasted on, with thick pen drawn over his curly lashes.

"Well?" Mr. Tucker’s fist faintly trembled and squeezed a plump kiwi fruit.

Max drifted, remembering the time he took his mum's razor and shaved a little beard on his Kiwi fruit. He returned his attention to the more immediate matter. "Well... what?"

"Are you going to pay for those?" Mr Tucker's voice crackled loud and then quiet, and loud again, like Mum's car radio. Max thought the words might have beamed out little holes in his chest.

"No." There was probably a better way of explaining the situation, but he couldn't think of it and his mum wasn't here. Yet. She would soon work out where he was - he always liked it when she did.

Max knew there were two extreme ways to express something when normal words in the middle wouldn't work. The first was to scream. The second was quite the opposite, and he believed it was a sign of his growing maturity knowing which was the most effective in a particular situation. 


He slowly sucked in air until his lungs felt like two overly pumped buggy tyres. Holding the air tight with the back of his throat, he exploded his lips wide open before clamping them shut like a cod fish, purely for effect. His cheeks puffed out and turned as red as the apples in his hands, and under the greenish tint of the flickering fluorescent lights, the grocery store magically transformed into his underwater world.

Mr. Tucker's lips drained of colour and pinched in, forming a cat's bottom. Max thought the man might be holding his breath too - in his own way, and given he was clearly very old it might be a better way than Max's. But he soon worked out the grocer was squirting short huffs of mostly air through his cat's bum and getting red-faced all on his own. Each time the man’s eyes twitched, they were looking in a new direction - probably for Max's mother.

Max felt giddy and excited, and his lips sealed tighter. Soon his mum would plunge through the door and rescue him from the seaweed monster behind the counter. She would gently pull him upward to the safety of air, with the two apples bobbing to the surface with them. He would give her the good apple, and he would eat the dropped one. The seawater would have washed it by then.

Swivelling his imaginary diver’s helmet toward the front of the store, Max felt a stone sink in his belly. The doorway remained empty, his mum was nowhere in sight and his chest was beginning to hurt. He eyed off the swollen, slightly mushed watermelons in the bargain crate and imagined his own head sitting there. Through the window beyond them, the street outside appeared a shade darker. He managed a faint frown and a little blip of air escaped his lips.

Mr. Tucker released the kiwi fruit and picked up his shiny black weapon from the counter. He boldly held the telephone like a gun to his own head, only this made Max feel frightened and Mr. Tucker grin with victory. He brought his other index finger up high and back down to the dial pad and pressed a number, his fingers punching on and off the buttons slowly, deliberately, like a little fish sucking on a pebble floor. The grocer now believed he was underwater, too. When the last number was pressed, the finger swam up to his tilted chin, and his eyes relaxed into circles of calm above.

Max's lungs desperately pumped tiny pretend breaths against the tight seal of his lips. What should he do? He had never got this far! Where was his mum?

"Hello...?" Mr. Tucker's voice boomed long and drawn into the phone, "Constable... Radcliffe?"

In one momentous pop, Max's lips burst apart, and his mouth became a quivering hole in his doomed zeppelin of a head. Air rushed out from his aching lungs to the floor as his body doubled over and deflated. The apples dropped from his hands and were still bouncing along the tiles as he practically teleported to the shop door. On the pavement outside he stepped right, but all he could see were strange faces poking out of coat collars, and umbrellas trying to flap away from the clutches of cold knuckles. Adults, dressed in all the shades of a worn-out road, were heading home to their families. Max turned and stepped left at the same time and smacked into a firm, padded shape; instantly recognisable to the entire length of his body. He wrapped his arms tight around her legs and let her rain coat fall around his shoulders.

“Mum! Where were you?” He tried to push her away a little, but her feet remained cemented and he sent himself backward instead.

“Well, Max, I’ve been waiting right here for you.” His mother glanced through the grocery window, and when her eyes returned to him, she was smiling her special grin. The one where she can see something glowing around the edges of him that she thinks is funny, even though Max is clearly not being funny at all.

“What happened to your apple, sweetie?”

Max wanted to tell her. He wanted her to feel sorry for him, to go back inside to face Mr. Tucker and come out with shiny apple, number three. But his mother hadn’t been there, she wasn’t a part of his underwater adventure anymore and without her to rescue him, the apple was just an apple. It no longer affected him as much as, say, being shipwrecked on a deserted island, or flying through the Bermuda Triangle. He felt very grown up indeed.

“I ate it,” Max lied. 

The Probability of a Trojan Hippo.

The following is my submission to [Fiction] Friday Challenge #218 at Write Anything.

Inspired by the image they provide, it's a fun exercise purely in creative flow. Oh dear - no editing allowed. :)

Somebody chopped it up. Right in front of my eyes. I reach, but my knock on wood just rings in and out of my ears. 

Someone carved up time and space, and the probability of them returning to how things were before. Quite neatly, but annoying, like a brash, not-very-puzzling pattern, as opposed to slashed, like jumbos cutting through a cloud over a delayed terminal. Life interrupted. Surely not the Butcher of Time, rather the Carpenter of Dimensions. Yes, this is their handi-work. A deviation from their plan, from their fail-safe design. Perhaps the linear lines seem dull after some time, even though their practicality is what held everything up, like cups and hiccups, and hippos under water gelled to the crust of a planet. Now it could be a pie, for all I know. Tiny little hippo snouts snorting chunky sweet custardy pleghm, the kind they just wake up one morning and have. Or is it one giant hippo with a foot snug in a custard tart? On, off. On, off. We see the yellow smudge of every fourth step, but there's no longer any evidence of the beats in-between.

I find myself grinding out dried up old custard from the grooves, so I can slot myself in them, instead. As soon as I get into the flow of one grain, I find myself going against the grain in the next. After all that effort. Now I am derailed, I need to adjust, like a clock quite happily 'being' and realising that yet another tick is needed, then for some unknown reason, a tock. Up down, Up down, tugged side-to-side, the tonal quality of happy, sad, happy, sad. Sixty mood swings a minute. 3600 bipolar blips an hour. A lifetime of bliss and pain and laughter and terror compressed, gone in sixty seconds before a new life begins. It must, it will. Time is manic, I suddenly remember. I much prefer the quiet still of the chaos I have found myself in. Chaos is so close to choice. Thankyou, I choose to sit this one out and watch. And pat this hippo, as I smile with self-content. Is that contents? Contents of self? Wait - who exactly am I?

To get a better look at myself, I take off my tool pouch and brush the sawdust off my hands and clothes.

Saturday night musings... "The Future You".

Imagine there is such thing as reincarnation. Imagine that whatever the limit is of your human consciousness now, is the level of consciousness that will define you in your next life. Those issues that remain undealt with, will be burdened onto the future child. Any dormant abilities, unfulfilled potential and repressed self-awareness will be theirs. You would have to live it all again, as them. Imagine you are just as responsible for your future reincarnated self, as you are for any child you may give life to in this time.
Do you feel that you are doing your best to prepare them for greater opportunities in life? Can you say you've become everything you can be to empower them to become the best they could be?

Flash Fiction beta readers needed [only 500 words]. :)

Hi all, I totally understand if you're busy, but if anyone could read my flash fiction story and give me feedback that would be great! Feel free to beat me with sticks via the comment box if you see anything glaring. But please - only paddle-pop sticks - they're tiny and constructive. :/
I'd especially like to hear if the story and themes make sense considering the 500 word limit. I've removed the last line, as I said I might do, and have edited the piece overall.
Thaaanks! I will be submitting this to the 500 word challenge over at Waxings: http://waxings.wordpress.com/500-word-challenge/breath/

*Note: I've done some editing since, and this version is now longer than 500 words.

----------------------------

Moving On

My lungs inflated right before my knees, chest and mouth hit the pavement. My beautiful ice-blue bicycle mimicked my fall like an adoring pet, only with the instinct to fall on the grassy nature strip. Teeth panging and mouth laced with fine gravel, I rushed my fingers up to my face. The wet on my lips was as red as my mother’s good lipstick - the shade she wears on dates, or to the Parents' Association meetings, where [my aunt Lilly says] they all throw verbal punches at mum. I pressed my lips together to stop it dripping.

Mr Allemand's cream picket fence blocked out the morning sun while I sat and recovered from wheezing. The milk was still on his porch from yesterday, turning into brilliant yellow bottles of cheese in the sun. Just not the kind you can eat, as mum always says. We have cheese of both kinds in our fridge. Mum and I got our refrigerator much later than other families did. I thought fridges kept food safe forever, and I was quite sick that month. My best friend, Martha, missed me terribly in those days I skipped school. How would we cope now?

Counting my grazes, I picked the best, imagining which one mum would say. My left knee - wait - no. Yes, definitely my left. I hauled my bike up theatrically, pretending it was a motorcycle while I grimaced sideways at Eddie Pierce’s house, but he wasn’t in his driveway yet, washing his Harley. I would see him on the way back. Suddenly my chest ached more than my teeth at the thought of returning home.

Martha’s driveway was several houses ahead, in view between the Robinia trees lining her lovely street. From this distance, I could believe her parents were having a garage sale of furniture on their lawn, and if I blurred my eyes - a birthday party for Martha. But the giant truck parked on the street would need to vanish, or turn into a travelling carnival stage. I dangled my feet off my pedals and let the wheels soundlessly carry me, rolling in front of Martha’s house like I was perched on a moving set in a Broadway musical. The familiar chrome glint of my rims would now be sparkling through the lace curtains of her windows. The front door opened.

Martha took a step forward, then the crutches. I dumped my bike among the boxes and furniture, and ran to my friend. Not knowing what to say anymore, we hugged each other hard and soft and hard again. I cried helplessly, and the tears ran down my chin and glued it to her shoulder. Was this the worst I would feel? What about tomorrow? I thought of mum and how Henry went off to war. I never met him. I remembered all the times she told me she missed him so bad her heart ached in her chest, and how my eyes would daze off. My tears doubled and my chest deflated with a long, quivering breath.

Blogbyte: Inverted Intervention

Inverted intervention: when a single person sits down with a group of friends or family and tells them how dysfunctional they all are.

Two Bulbous Forms, Still Life.

Two bulbous forms with gently drooped lips adorn a table for two, right next to yours in your favourite cafe. The forms are closely matched in design and colour, aesthetically one taller, the other squatter. This still-life is indeed perfectly still. Unshaken by a knock of the table. Unaffected by the sensuous human experience playing out around them - of tantalising tastes squishing onto forks and aromatic scents deliciously marbling with spirited conversations.

This pair is not a set of inoffensively contrasting vases, or kitch salt and pepper shakers. This duo is the Unhappy Couple. They sit perched on their chairs like a pair of dusty china cats who once complemented each other, only they've been bumped some time ago and are forever offset as each stares beyond the shoulder of the other into eternity. They don't speak to each other, they don't look at each other, they glumly sip from a coffee cup or poke at a ricotta spinach filo and side salad, all with as little physical movement as possible.

In another context this quite morose human vignette would go relatively unnoticed. Catching sight of them on a train, for instance. Standing behind them in a juice bar queue. But what if you've raced down to a cafe to meet a friend in dire need of caffeine-charged personal advice and your table is jammed right up against theirs? Or imagine you and your romantic mate have chosen a spot in a quiet, practically empty restaurant - and this universal pair walk straight up and slowly lower themselves into chairs right beside yours like a couple of leering old men sinking into your turkish bath. That's a little close, don't you think?

At this point you are forced to reconsider your purpose for the day. You are no longer a couple of friends or lovers in your own bubble, the sound of your private conversation drowned out by the equal sounds at roughly equal distances of everyone else. Instead, for the next 45 minutes you become Days Of Our Lives to the Unhappy Couple watching and listening as they sullenly munch away at their tv dinners.

If you can sweat it out, I promise you, you will out-sit the Unhappy Couple. As soon as the last mouthful passes their silently bitter and twisted lips and scratches it's way down into their dried up pits of resentment, those dagger-eyes will scour for the bill or cash register. The pair will quietly gather their rather obvious baggage and drag it all to another cafe and sit down at another table beside another couple to watch more re-runs of their old life.

Although it's quite aggravating to feel like you're being listened in on and stared at for an album length by a couple of spooks from an 80s cold war movie, it does put things into perspective. We say we want to find someone to grow old with - but the part we truly desire is to grow together. Aging is just the unavoidable biological part, and the passing of time, in itself, is irrelevant compared to the journey.

Our first Write Night!

Well what a wonderful night we had at the Beehive on thursday, our first Write Night for a small handful [like, a three fingered ET hand] of writers here along the surf coast. http://write-night.blogspot.com/
Our first exercise was to write a poem inspired by Kirstin's eminently saucy teapot called The Queen of Hearts. We had only five minutes to do this, which was quite a challenge for someone like me who a) doesn't write much poetry and b) takes about a year to be happy with a first page. As a result, I received special consideration in the group, and subsequently promised my second-born [first-born was promised already] for an extra two minutes. Check out our write-night blog for the 5 minute poems by Kirstin and Poncho & Petticoat! :)

~

The Queen's Heart, by Melinda

Early morning blue

tints the royal sheets

The royal dress is buttoned while

the soft blue mountain sleeps

Fifty fingers fluff her collar

so stately and devine

yet, the royal blue nipple

will be his again tonight

~

Gold to the ground

Autumn trees
are the scorpios of nature
Rich, red, gutsy and
about to bare all

Throwing gold to the ground
like a king rich in cash
and poor in companions

Throwing gold to the ground
like it grows on trees

Thought of the day...

This one is for a special friend. :)

We are all Archaeologists of our own minds.
Unfortunately, we are far better at burying things.

Thought of the day...

Never do anything by halves. It's either all, or quarters.