Author: Kirsty Lewin

fall from grace

It starts with a trip, a misstep, a twist of the knee, the wrong lean, the wrong righting, righteous instead of right up and then she is done, face falling and flat lining, pavement coming up towards her, the roar of the bus, the bawl of brakes, the oil burn smell of acrid nearly, pot-holed tarmac dancing meaning, falling flailing until all about her isn’t grey concrete diesel grubby chip fat but violent turquoise, French lemon, olive tart, she is falling, fumbling, floating, tender rose coral on the turn of the tide, underwater psalms of sirens blessing mermen, bottle-nosed dolphins bundling and nuzzling, still she glides her arms outstretched her legs in freefall her caramel trenchcoat undone about face, rushing air spool sweet in her lungs, weightless about her girth her belly gone until suddenly, no not suddenly, a dandelion soft landing lips down, Venus sea fans about her cheeks, everything violet camber green she lands, is landing, from her fall from grace.

exercise musings

Under Wasp Rule

Cheiko Kikuchi, an 87-year-old Japanese woman, is in her wheelchair, heading to her home from her retirement complex. A swarm of Asian giant hornets descends, hornets that leave gaping holes in their victims’ bodies. Kikuchi screams and weeps but no passer-by intervenes. Even the fire brigade, called by her nursing home assistant, dares not to move in to help. The attack lasts ten minutes short of an hour. She is stung 150 times. She dies the next day.

Wasps live in houses and humans live in mud nests. Wasps leave out poison in organic beefburgers and cans of Coke. Wasps smoke out humans, targeting their fragile pulmonary systems, their sensitive ophthalmic nerves.

Austin McGeough, 21, has a wisdom tooth removed. Later he goes to a party. Alcohol and dental pharmaceuticals are a dangerous mix. He wanders away from the party, intoxicated and confused. He finds a building with a broken window, covered in cardboard. He pulls back the cardboard and is attacked by wasps defending their territory. He calls an ambulance, leaves the building, and heads for the highway, hoping to meet it on its way. He is run over by two drivers and killed. Wasps are efficient. Why waste energy on killing when victims do the work for you?

Wasps barbeque dragonflies as humans drown in Sprite. Wasps play tennis on smooth clay courts and humans flit around the edges of the nets, pointless, inane.

Wasps are sociable, living in colonies of up to 10,000 workers. Newly-mated queen wasps hibernate in the winter, emerging in spring to build their homes, colonising old human habitations. Red velour curtains are a favourite. As are Liberty cushions. And rotting oak floorboards. Queens lay eggs that hatch into sterile female workers. The workers take over the home making and food collection. The queen continues egg laying.

The queen announces wasp public holidays. And sting-free days for humans – one day every seven years.

Mary Church is 78. She’s a great grandmother who loves children and gardening. She pokes around in a barrel where she is neither welcome nor wanted. A wasp stings her finger. She thinks nothing of it, and then passes out. Her daughter phones an ambulance, attempts CPR. It’s too late. Mary did not have an epi-pen. The wasp knew. Wasps do their research. Wasps take no prisoners. Why waste resources on a prison system when a sharp prick will do?

Wasps give ice-cream vendors special dispensation. Adult wasps feed on sugary liquid secreted by wasp larvae. In late summer, as the larvae mature, humans compete with wasps for ice-cream. Humans never win. Wasp larvae eat carrion and insects. Humans do not compete with the larvae for this nutrition. Not yet. So far, the costs involved are not worth the effort.

Wasps point out important stuff on flipcharts, wargaming biological weapons. Venom from some hornets dissolves human tissue, making a hole big enough for a human pinky. Humans do not know why the wasps have chosen this level of damage. Why a pinky? Why not a thumb? Will wasps develop further weapons of mass destruction? Humans smash themselves off windows, whining and screeching. They want to know everything but they understand nothing,

Asian giant hornets are tactical. Sometimes they target the allergic. At other times they go all out full frontal. Vespa mandarinia hornets hide in the soil, waiting for vegetable pickers. In three months, a swarm kills 41 people and injures 1,600 in Ankang. Humans learn that vespa mandarinia do not respond well to flame-throwers. The pickers run and the pickers die.

At the start of all this, wasps set up border controls, security patrols, and stop and search. Now wasps ban human research into insect eradication. They ban protest marches, public meetings, and judicial reviews. Wasps kettle and bristle and put down any whisper of insurgency.

Wasps do not use lines on maps. Wasps do not set predictable boundaries. Wasps outdrone drones and outclass pest controllers.

Wasps have yet to ban the printing press. It’s only a matter of time.

poetry

a short poem about war

a sho t

po (gro)m

abo (r)t

war

Tags Ukraine, war

fiction Flash fiction

Poppies

He pins it to her. A white poppy made of old tissue paper. Its thin stem wooden green. A nappy safety pin to hold it to her breast.

He stands back. Regards her. Look at you, he says, ruffling her hair loose from its black band, touching her lower lip with a finger.

She blinks, steps past him, looks at herself in the wall mirror. They are in a large crimson anteroom on the second floor of the theatre. Her long black dress, sleeveless and backless, is too loose around her hips. She has diminished, she thinks, in the last few weeks.

His poppy, purple paper with a daube of gold glitter in the centre, is tucked into the ribbon of his top hat. Jazzy, he says, pointing at it and twirling around her. He clicks his heels, bows.

They are alone in the anteroom. Alone in the theatre. Apart from the marmalade cat, all ribs and balding, that dumps half eaten rats under the grand piano that still hovers the stage. The piano’s black keys have been obliterated, its velvet cushioned stool long since burnt for heat or comfort or just for something to do.

Let’s dance, he says, taking her hands in his. She frowns, pulls her fingers away. His touch is sticky awkward on her skin. I don’t remember how, she says.

She steps back, he steps forward.

We used to know, he says. His voice is light, neutral. She can’t meet his eyes. Outside a siren blares, passes, fades. The walls shudder. Wind pushes in through the broken windows. It’s dark out, a shade beyond grey.

He steps forward, she steps back.

See, he says, we’re dancing. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other. Stretches her hips. Shakes the old silk around her bare legs. Black is a colour she’d never worn.

Until this.

She touches her tissue flower. Where? she asks. Where has he been, where did he get it, did he go further than he should?

Here, he says. I was just here. He sweeps his arm around the room. A great wide flourish. Clacks his heels on the parquet floor, bends his knees, lifts his top hat in the air, and dances. Off he goes, languid and febrile, glib and gauche. Round her, and round her, in ever increasing circles. Clacking through the shards of glass, leaping the collapsed beam, kicking up the dust into dull dove clouds.

He reaches the far corner of the room by the door to the stairwell. The corner with the white spangled tulle dress splayed out in a foolish soft pile. Where a woman might have stood. Fluting champagne, smoking Silk Cut through jade or ivory. Holding a wrist out for a curtsy or a kiss. He stops.

Another siren. The room blinks blue red blue and back to bare.

She lifts her arms, points a toe, follows him to the corner, clomping through the glitter in her hiking boots. He looks down at the white dress, moves off towards the window. A little skip a little jump. A snap of fingers from each grubby raised hand.

She puts her hands on her hips, lifts her skirt. Furls and unfurls. Lunges and lifts. Tango without his frame. They dance and tap and spin around the room, out of synch, in breathy ravaged silence across the shards. Passing the white dress again and again.

She stops first. Her boots inches from the embroidered frock. They look at each other. They look at the dress. He picks it up with both arms. Cradling it. Rocking it. To and fro. She leans in. Resting on him. Drops her face. Breathes in the milky breath. The talcum powder. The coddling.

Look at you, she says. Look at you two.

exercise memoir poetry

Drawing, life

Later, in the break, I am not what I expect.

She, my aunt, supplies the robe. It is white, towelling, lemon bitter soft. I change behind the Japanese screen. I am wider than the Japanese women, but not split three ways. Not yet. I tuck my knickers into the pocket of my jeans. Fold my bra into itself.

The uncovering is awkward. They are careful not to look. Not looking, carefully.

They, five of them, have signed up for life drawing, and I, just me, have signed up for £15. I am twenty-two, recently dumped by a soldier boyfriend.

You told me to go back to her, he said, so I did.

What do you do with a black wooden hat stand with its felt array of goblin hats that you bought for the boyfriend you no longer have?

I stand beside the chaise longue, stretch my toes. My toenails are unadorned. I don’t look at myself or them.

How to disrobe? Untie the belt. Coil, coiling.

Uncoiled.

They are sharpening pencils, flattening paper on easels, pulling up sleeves. They are whispering. There is mention of how cold it is out.

Most of them will be dead now.

They are in caramel and beige and navy and white. Close-knitted fishermen’s sweaters, big jewels, thin necks that crease, pince, fold.

The room smells of turps, lavender, mineral, lead pencil, artists’ paper.

The art of seeing. I am naked.

She is the nude.

The tutor, my aunt, a painter, and someone important at the Edinburgh College of Art, directs me into a pose on the chaise longue.

After fifteen seconds I twitch, I itch, I pull, I stretch. Count down time on my toes, my nose, noes, so many knows.

Fifteen-minute bursts. Bursting to move.

The men don’t draw my face. The women shade my groin. I tour, in the robe at half time, a regal inspection, a glittering eye.

They use charcoal and pencil. Sweep the page. I am belly thigh chin calves. Some of them fill in the strawberry pattern of the chaise longue, the fabric more comfortable than a breast or nipple.

I feel them blunten flatten distemper perspective.

Sex doll, centrefold, still-life.

They catch the clutch of my clavicle.

I have nothing on my skin but shifting air. She is nude and I am naked.

Would you tank that canvas?

Object or subject. Take your pick.

I do not yet have the language of war.

In the break they circle me, close in, offer a custard cream. Take two, someone says.

I tongue the crumbs out of my teeth.

Why did I tell him to go back to her?

He holds his crayon up, measures me with a skewed eye. I am three inches. He calculates perspective. Block by anatomical block. There is gin on his breath. And olive.

Thumbelina.

Crawling shame where there is no shame and no need for any crawling, not at all.

My sighs hue and thigh.

Cindy Sherman in fractured flesh.

Disembodied, disempowered, disingenuous. Is it over yet?

I once drew the head of a dachshund, just the ears nose throat. I was rather pleased with the result.

In the flat next door a baby cries. The baby will cry for ninety minutes. The howls set teeth on edge, tighten wrists, diminish scale.

Five mannequin heads on the top shelf. Two without wigs. All with bats for lashes.

He said I put the idea into his head.

The ear that hasn’t been cleaned, the eyes veer swerve bend.

The woman at the near end of the five isn’t holding back. Her arms sweeps her mouth opens her hips wide and dancing. I want to smile at this woman.

I could give the goblin hats to the mannequin heads. Two each to the ones without wigs.

I don’t. Of course I don’t smile.

Never smile during the pose only at the end when I’m dressed and have three notes in the brown envelope.

And the tips.

This piece is written from the prompt ‘portrait’. The photograph is a section of a graphite and charcoal drawing ‘Sitting Woman’ by Jude Nixon, Edinburgh (2015).

Tags life drawing

fiction Flash fiction

The prayer book

If there was red to see, she saw it. Red in the flames flickering out of the peat. Red in the curling cable of Mrs White’s Bakealite phone. Red in the poppy curtains in the wash house in Dunston Street. Red in the tweed at the bottom of her dead sister’s bed. She saw red in the rouge of bossier women’s cheeks. She saw red in the second note of the starling’s song. She saw a red bus, a red anorak, a red rag, a red bull and a redshank.

She spread red jam on teacakes, stewed red apples for strudels, washed red pants with white sheets. Shite.

She saw red where there was no red. She did that for spite. Spite was her thing. Like spit and flight and poor eyesight. She banged on about red. To the postman, the fireman and the fish man. To the lollipop lady and the men that dug up the streets, put them back together, and dug them up again.

The village called her Better Red Than Dead, or that old bat, depending on who was listening. Walls have ears. Even the red ones.

It’s not right, the village said, that she killed her husband with the red book and got away with murder. The vicar demurred. After all, it was his red book. What else could he do? She’d lifted it from his bedside table when she’d been in to ask advice about the neighbour’s sons slicing down her red hot pokers.

The local red top had her all over the front pages.

PENSIONER SEES RED IN PRAYER BOOK RAMPAGE

The village was agog, aghast, agate. The village removed as much red as possible. Bunting. Road signs. Red tiled roofs. Red cars and red socks and even the vicar’s moccasins.

Who’ll be next, they whispered at the bridge club. We should burn the diamonds and hearts said the women who’d taken to wearing blue.

She bought herself a red cape. Velvet with white rabbit fur trim. Took her walks late into the night. Gliding down the cobbled lanes looking for scarlet, pillarbox, cherry, strawberry, rowan, crimson, penny red. Looking in windows. The village windows. At the flickering red flames. Children’s pyjamas. Husbands’ smoking jackets. A cashmere throw. A satin cushion. A prayer book hidden behind a chair.

Poor Jim, the vicar preached, our dearly beloved Red Baron not even ninety-five. Taken before his time by a woman gone mad for a colouring crime, god rest his soul.

The day the last red car left the village was the last day. A pale face staring from the rear window, a red lips kiss on the misted pane.

This was a writing exercise using the prompt ‘red’.

Tags red

fiction Flash fiction

Lang Willie

Aye, lang may the willie keep us warm, Morag, Arthur says.

Are you taking the mickey, Arthur?

Morag and Arthur are sitting on two worn faux-leather arm chairs in front of a two-bar electric heater. They hold their stocking-soled feet out to catch the warmth. They both have a blanket around their shoulders. His is moss green, hers is a red and yellow tartan.

Morag is wearing a black woollen hat with a scarlet pompom and a matching coat. She has not unbuttoned the coat. A soft grey scarf in a silky material sits up around her chin, hiding her neck. Arthur is wearing a pale brown v-neck sweater over a shirt of a similar colour. His trousers have a neat pressed line down the centre of each leg. One of his socks is black, the other navy blue.

The net curtain over the one small window shivers. It is dark out, four in the afternoon in the far north of the country. The radio on the sideboard is almost inaudible. It’s probably cricket commentary. It was always cricket commentary. Behind the pair, stretched along the bottom of the front door, is a black velour lang willie, its pink eye fixed on Morag.

Just making conversation, Arthur says.

Aye, Morag replies. She fiddles in the leather tote bag on her lap, takes out a toffee, unwraps it and rolls it into her mouth. She sucks on the sweet and wriggles her toes. Her left cheek bulges. She looks at the faded floral wallpaper, the chipped table legs, the sideboard with nothing on it but the radio and a white candle in a beer bottle.

Fifty years, Morag, he says. To the day. He pulls his blanket tighter around his shoulders. Looks into the heater. Not even a postcard, he says. Not even.

I was never big on postcards, she says. She takes the toffee out of her mouth, wraps it in a tissue and puts in her bag. Pulls her scarf higher up her neck.

I thought you were, you know… Arthur shifts in the chair, crosses his legs, uncrosses them.

What’s that, Arthur?

Dead. I thought you were dead.

Why would I be dead? Morag’s tone is neutral. She looks at Arthur for the first time since they’ve sat down. Outside, the rain starts and the wind picks up. The light in the small room flickers, fades and resets.

Arthur takes a moment to reply. That’s what the papers said, he says. And the postmaster.

That Eric wouldn’t know nothing, Morag says. Her voice has risen an octave.

He was your boss, love.

Love? You’ve picked up an odd way of speaking, Arthur.

Arthur crosses his legs again. His eyes fix on the upper bar in the heater. The heater gives their faces the faintest of orange glows.

Morag looks at Arthur’s hands. The ring is still there. The flat wide gold band. Her lips tremble. She reaches for the toffee.

Arthur pushes his hands under his blanket. Strokes his knees. Morag wonders whether there’s a cat under there. Or worse.

Where did you get that lang willie, Arthur?

Mrs Hawthorne made it for me. After the double pneumonia.

Pneumonia you say? That’ll be the smoking.

I’d given up, he says. The night you went. Promised myself. Promised you.

Oh, she says. They that dance must pay the fiddler.

Arthur coughs, pushes his blanket off and gets up from the chair. He walks to the window. Stands there with his back to her.

And who is Mrs Hawthorne, anyway? Morag continues.

Arthur pulls aside the net curtain and looks out into the glen. Watches the rain filling the potholes in the gravel track. Watches the rain sliding over Morag’s small red Mini.

What are you doing here, Morag? he says to the window.

I don’t know, love, she says. I don’t know.

blog exercise

Handiwork

In today’s writing class we considered excerpts from Sara Baume’s Handiwork. We discussed some of the themes of her book – labour, home, hobbies, inheritance – along with the craft of her writing. We also returned to Lopate’s work on the writer as character in essays.

The fragments below are from the writing exercises in the class.

Queensland 1987 in the last pass of the cucumber season. Twenty-two years old and leader of a chain gang. Picked up on a dusty violet dawn by a gang master outside a state government unemployment office. Back tray of his ute backward-facing leant on backpacks, towels tied around faces as dust jackets. Later, the conveyor shuffles the cucumbers in starts and fits. It’s the motor that’s distressed. Sacked by the gang master for the audacious act of fixing the conveyor belt chain.

This is the desk that Scott built. Scott is dead. Killed, he said beforehand, by the genes of his father and the distractions of his doctor. I’ll not live past fifty he said, as he sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor building this desk from a John Lewis flatpack. He was right and I write here in amongst the skirmish of desiccated pens and never finished notebooks and mugs of hot water, mugs bought on the Wild Atlantic Way from an Irish woman in a yellow apron who threw in a fruit scone with the white tissue-paper wrapping. How to Write Like Tolstoy. March Was Made of Yarn. The Trip to Echo Spring. The Student Guide to Writing. Concise Scots Dictionary (nothing concise about it). Scott is dead but he built this desk and now he is rinsed from the Internet. A GoPro, a stapler out of staples, a dried-out Pritt Stick, a Christmas stamp yet to be used, a wash-blue ceramic plant pot crammed with pointless pens for a pointless whiteboard I never crown.

Bought. A red sandstone flat, listed, in an empire building named Windsor Mansions by someone who may or may not have been taking the piss in 1896. Bought from a couple who rode a motorbike over the Alps in 1949 and never invested in gas central heating. Inside the flat, plants clamber and vegetables spoil and there’s a red thing happening which all started with the purchase of a post-box red Bakelite phone, bought with the proceeds of a focus group payment.

Some people have hobbies. She has campaigns, diatribes, schemings, manoeuvres. It is said, in whispers, that she begs, cajoles, witters on. She crusades and yet she is no crusader. No tunic or tabard, no applique red cross or oversize brown leather gloves. There is a sword in a museum up the road. If push comes to shove.

Watching north is not the same as watching south. The accordion bounces chipper on the Macedonian’s knees, the wheeze of his instrument his wheeze, my wizard. His knitted hat turns bare head turns sun hat turns bare head turns knitted hat. A year in hats with a constant, three beat, bouncing wheeze. Or a tango. Hats and accordion watching north.

exercise fiction Flash fiction

Arch

She’d said he was arch. What did she mean? He wasn’t familiar with the word used like that. Was she referring to his eyebrow? The struggling dense heft of it? But it is straight, more or less, just the hint of a curve, with a blind summit that whips over the bridge of his nose.

He is sitting on the faux leather pouffe by the bay window in his dead mother’s otherwise empty house, turning and twisting arch in his damp hands.

Perhaps she meant his feet. She’d seen them naked when he’d leant against the bus shelter and stepped out of his sandals that first afternoon in Zadar. Rested the swell and pink of them on the cool of the veined marble. Wiped his brow with his handkerchief. That’s better, he’d said, spreading his toes.

She’d been sitting at the other end of the seat in the shelter, thumbing through a guide book. She’d put the book down and studied him, her eyes tracking his rough toenails, the tight skin pulled up hard under his fleshy soles, the bunion on his right foot, a gift from his grandmother. He’d flattened his feet on the stone, allowing the cold to travel up his ankles, up the back of his calves, willed the flow of cool in behind his sweating knees.

He’d put a hand to his face, peered at her over his thumb. Watched her lean over the hem of her yellow cotton dress, push her white ankle socks down, undo her heavy brown lace-up walking shoes, remove them, and rest her stocking feet on the ivory stone. You’re right, she said. It works.

She called him arch on their second date in a taverna near his hotel and he is still mulling over it three months later. It’s not like him to dwell. He’s never known a dwelling like it. But he can’t dwell on her. Not now.

Arch. Did it have a capital A? Would that have made a difference? Her hand was on his when she said it, her brown eyes skewed and her breath olive brine. There was a tension in her fingers but not the one he wanted. Not a ‘she held my hand in hers’ tension. No, a pressing, a forcing even. Was she building an arch? Between them? Over him?

There’s a dead pigeon in the middle of the street. It is flat, apart from one wing that sticks up, sail like, and flaps back and forward in the wind. Three crows circle the bird, hopping towards it in what is surely a choreographed dance. Purposeful. Uppity. A taxi draws up, the driver brakes hard, and the corvids scatter. But only far enough to avoid the vehicle. They are back as soon as the wheels have passed safely over either side of the corpse.

Arch has no points to fix on. Arch is gallery and ecclesiastical and sandstone red. Arch is a nun’s habit and a choral hymn and night clubs and knock your head off if you stand up too quick in the dead end of the cave they still call Acheron. You’re arch, Peter, she said, pressing her fingers into his knuckles and forcing her teeth into his wrist. He had jumped and his free hand was sudden fist and clench and flying towards her.

I didn’t mean that, he said to her as they stepped out into the night. She didn’t reply.

Vampish, his brother George said, as they looked through Peter’s holiday photos on his phone in the airport carpark. There she was in her yellow dress and clackety shoes and teeth that had just too much point. George is a man of the world, has an Alexa, and bought him, Peter, the latest iPhone and one square metre of the moon for his fortieth birthday.

He rearranges the letters on his palms. Char. Char for charcoal. Charlady. At a pinch, churlish. She shouldn’t have bitten. She left a mark. He doesn’t do marks, indentures, fault lines. His was a life unblemished. Climate controlled. He was pure and she had soiled him. Did he dwell on the nip and tuck of her too white teeth? Only for a day.

It took twenty-two hours to decide.

Arch. Rach. Ratchet. Yes, he’d ratcheted up. Not with intemperate emotion. No. He took his time. Now he sits in his dead mother’s house and retraces every step in the dust on the bare boards around his naked feet.

The crows are sharing their spoils. There is enough to go round. They do it, he is sure, with good grace. They take it in turns to eye and peck and flutter and swallow and fly and return to eye. They would have done the same to his mother if they had found her first. He wouldn’t have begrudged them. Crows have a natural order of things. In an impudent, saucy way.

Maybe she meant saucy, when she said arch. Maybe she had a lazy eye and she was nervous and she meant saucy and she’d meant to kiss but had bitten instead.

Anyway. She is buried now. Under the arch with its scopophiliac view of the Katedrala Svetog Jakova. It was what she wanted. He had been sure of that at the time. Why use the word otherwise?

I wrote this piece off the back of the prompt ‘arch’ in the National Portrait Gallery cafe in a writing session with friends.

blog exercise musings

On curiosity

I am curious about the relationship between a living daughter and her dead father.

I am curious about fishmongers that fight to the death.

I am curious about the relationship between a single person and their ageing cat.

I am curious about people who choose a brush over a comb.

I am curious about black satin sheets.

I am curious about fibre versus salt.

I am curious about people born from the wrong parent.

I am curious about emergency avocados.

Here is a quiz. This is a quiz about me, not you. Answer quickly and honestly. Answer yes or no. Am I:

astute

patronising

loyal

a cheat

a liar

forgiven

forsaken

overwrought

unreliable (narrator)

selfish

deluded

stuck

Stuck! That’s it. I am curious about why I am stuck. Stuck in the middle of you. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle of me.

Did you tick yes or no on stuck? Go on, tell me. I can take it (or I can’t – believe what you need to believe). I need to know. I won’t hold a grudge, I promise. Grudge wasn’t on the list. Does Kirsty bear a grudge? Oh yes, she is the queen of grudge-bearing. Wraps them up in tissue paper and sprays them with lavender oil and cedar to keep the moths at bay.

I am curious. Is there anyone out there who is more stuck, with more grudges, than her?

Mrs Watson once told me to stack my characteristics in a pyramid. Your best at the top, she said, pointing to her jade encrusted crown, and your worst at the bottom, she said, pointing to her mud encrusted wellington boots. But I’m not daft. She meant I only had one likeable trait, and several that would be found wanting. Stupid old bat. So I inverted the pyramid. On the top line: Affectionate, Broad-minded, Compassionate, Dependable, Efficient, Forgiving, Generous, Honest, Imaginative, Just, Kind, Loyal. On the next line more in the same sequential vein with some unfortunate afflictions thrown in. Oppressive, Rigid, Secretive. And so on until I had just the one negative trait left to provide.

I chose irascible. At the base of the unstable wobbling toppling hierarchy of me I chose irascible. Irascible is a heavy lifter. Irascible has ballast. Irascible has toe holds and firm footings. Irascible will neither budge nor blether. Irascible is anchor and resistance and purchase.

Irascible is a top word that is best placed at the bottom.

When I am down I retrieve my grudges from their moth proof wrappings. I hold them to my face. Stroke them and stoke them. Stroke, stoke. Stroke, stoke. Stroke, stoke.

There’s a lot I could say about Dr Strangelove.

And charm bracelets.

I wrote these notes from today’s writing class. We discussed Philip Lopate’s essay ‘On the necessity of turning oneself into a character’ in To Show and To Tell.