Category: exercise

Categories
exercise

Missing Leer

Brenda is weary, teary, bleary-eyed. She’s been calling for her coffee for six hours now. Six hours and no response. Why such ridiculous silence? Have staff no manners anymore? She only needs a coffee and a lemon meringue pie – no drama! She wipes her face, shrugs, and slouches her shoulders deep down in her brown hessian wrap.

No sounds from anywhere. No clinking of cups or saucers. No whirring steaming machines. No chirpy gossiping from underpaid waitresses.

She is, of course, as always, alone in a seedy dark cafe, almost 4am, no friend, husband, wife or lover beside her. Her driver, Max, will be worried. No, she reappraises. Max will be snoring, sleeping, wanking. No need for Max. All she desires is a coffee, a double espresso if she’s offered a choice.

She pulls over a second chair, raises her legs, parks her heels carefully, folds her arms and closes her eyes. Sheep jump fences in dozens. She could number each one although why?

5am. A sound! Someone walking on broken glass? Someone scraping, opening a door, forcing a window? Brenda is seldom afraid. She scans shelves of crockery and pepper grinders, she looks over dim lines of chairs and benches, she checks over rugs and nooks and crannies. She sees no-one, hears everyone. So many sudden suspicious noises, so much grubby darkness!

Brenda never screams. She is seldom afraid. Now, however, she has her chance. Brenda opens her lips wide, readies her jaw, and screams. She screams and screams and screams.

Window glass shivers, cracks and falls. Doors blow open and slam closed. Jugs waver and shake, carafes whine and jiggle. Rugs roll up and die. Brenda needs a friend, a lover, anyone to hear her screams. Even a police officer would do.

She pauses screaming, plucks her phone from her purse and dials 999. Hello, she says, hello, hello, hello?

No answer.

Overhead ceiling panels creak then collapse. Brenda lies in pale smoking rubble, her hessian wrap all askew. Only a coffee, she whispers beneath several beams and planks. I only came in for an espresso and a lemon meringue pie.

Categories
exercise Flash fiction

Santa’s Lipogram

It’s Christmas and I can’t contain it, I’m so happy so manic so wildly lit up! I want Santa and I want him now.

Santa is a famous fat man who understands snow and stars and birds and Bambi and visits kids at night, gifting all sorts of stuff.

Watching, waiting, glowing kids prick up nostrils, smooth back curly hair (dark or fair) looking for gifts, for surprising animals (a fox, a chimp, a fish, a rhino), putting out Dad’s gin and Mum’s cola.

Christmas wasn’t always fun. In old days, Christmas was, for many folk, dark and morbid. Christmas had Satan.

Satan was a bad man. Satan had a chariot and took infants from cots at night. Singing songs of damnation, Satan slung sorry bairns into sacks and took his loot into his Christmas shop, a shop dimly lit with dragons and mouldy sprouts.

Anyway, you don’t want to know about Satan. It’s Christmas! I’m planning a carnival for fun with biscuits, rum, trout, scallops, custard and vodka – all of it in bright glass, pans and pots – all of it for folk in our church.

I’ll put this pillar of gifts by our arbor of oak and holly and folk will sing hymns, sing loudly for Santa and Mary (although sadly, many may sing for that awful man Satan).

Categories
exercise fiction

Queue

He queues. Red coat. Green gum boots. A prune-coloured bowler hat. He queues for the bus but the bus does not come. He stands there anyway. Stomps from foot to foot. Hunkered underneath the tweed red coat grandfather had left him after the death. The family calls the death the death because the death was the death of all deaths, grandfather’s death and nobody else’s. He queues and stomps and looks at the wee woman swathed in violet blue, a yellow scarf across her cheeks. Black-eyed, the woman. Grandfather’s dead black eyes. Across from the woman a toddler alone. No mother no father no-one at all. Just a toddler that screams for the bus. No, not screams, more throaty growls, arms that wave and bare feet that stamp stamp stamp all out of sorts. He queues for the bus she queues for the bus and the toddler stamps on the concrete all out of sorts.

The burst, unexpected. A burst detergent. Bubbles all over the place everywhere. The queue jumps and leaps, grasps and snatches. Bubbles that shatter flaunt and scatter. The man wants more bubble bomb bursts. Explode over here, he shouts. More bursts and more bubbles! The bus does not come. Not now, not ever. Not a bus stop after all. A laundry shed. A shed full of bumble bubbles. The man walks off. Crosses the road. Leaves the black-eyed woman and the fowl smell of the toddler. Laundry? Pfft! No need for that!

The man has long left when the bus comes. The bus comes for the laundry and the queue and the bumble bubbles. The woman enters the bus. The bubbles enter the bus. The man cannot see whether the bare-footed toddler enters the bus or not. He walks up the road. Spots another bus stop. Rubs his prune-coloured bowler hat. And queues.

Categories
exercise fiction

Demons

Twist and curl, fist and whirl, blissed and hurl, christ. He sits cross-legged on the bare stone slabs weaving the strands into shapes, not shapes, dolls not dolls, demons (he loops his lips around the word). Demons. Demons for the local market.

Sits there in the scratchy light he pitches forward and back, pulling out handfuls of straw from the bale listening to the hale on the hot tin roof, stuffing their arms shaping their bellies gutting out their mouths with a swift gouge of his only knife.

Lays each incomplete demon out flat, tall and lean to the rear, short and rumpy to the front there in the bare room where he lives without furniture without props without comfort just the rusted out chassis of a Ford he’d pulled from the burn one November night the fish scattering the phosphorus dimpling purple green dragging it back leaving a chassis shaped gash through his field of post-wheat blue.

Gives some of them eyes, the males at least, red map pins, the child demons get green, none of them a nose or ears or cheeks although some, perhaps one in ten, the lucky ones, they clutch a three-pronged pitchfork fashioned from number eight fencing wire he cuts from rusting coils on a farm on the other side of the village.

Perches those fully spawned fiends on the chassis, hither and thither, turning them into couples each facing the other down those with eyes lording it over those without, the candle spluttering their shadows into some demented stage.

Sleeps when he’s finished his work for the night on a narrow mattress of incomplete baby ghouls the half worked shapes yet to have their mouths plowed his body flattening them into a semblance of wary hunger and furious refinement.

Does he, a sleeping man of some inordinate age in a loin cloth and a rag that may once have been a t-shirt of rainbows and unicorns, does he imbibe these infant fiends with life actual life? If he was asked and why would he be nobody else knows of the ghoulish mattress but him, he’d shake his head slowly his lips parting then pausing then pursing and closing.

Erects his cardboard sign ‘pay what you prefer’ on his grass pitch at the market with his fifty demons grinning wheat ear to wheat ear and sometimes perhaps once a month the old woman selling dried herbs in the stall beside him brings him a nice cup of chamomile tea.

Categories
exercise fiction

The early makings of Virginia

I was born on a breathless Tuesday in January 1882. My mother wanted to name me Virginia, my father Adeline. They tossed a coin at the goose for him to choose.

South Kensington was all frocks, frills and crinoline. Our nanny had an index finger missing from her left hand and a right hand too quick to slap.

From the age of three I slept not in my cot but under it. Anything to avoid the glass eye of Ivory, the woman who polished the wooden floors on her hands and knees and emptied the potties. It wasn’t her fault but she smelt like my mother’s bottom.

I was the seventh child of Julie and Leslie. I didn’t learn their names until I was six. We weren’t a household on first name terms. 

May-Ann taught me Latin and Greek from books Father kept behind glass and up a forbidden ladder. I was fluent in both by the time I was ten, surpassing both May-Ann and Father. 

We did it for the first time in the maid’s cupboard just off the women’s library. I was fifteen and her kiss was all coal hair and inky fingers and cigarette snuffle.

Of course I wanted a goose of my own. What young independent woman about town didn’t – especially one who was known to wear trousers? I named him Morris. Mother refused to let him into the house after he’d built a nest in the kitchen woodpile using feathers pulled from Father’s prayer cushion. 

Was I lonely? Not with Morris. Although I would have preferred that Morris was a Maureen or, better still, a Mariah. Morris had a tendency to squawk and lunge when things didn’t go his way. Habits that I was to first copy and then adopt for the rest of my life. 

May-Ann preferred my Latin poetry to my Greek. Amo amas amat she said without moving her lips. May-Ann’s lips were sewn together with pig bristle sutures – or so she claimed I had written in Greek. 

May be continued..

Categories
exercise Flash fiction

Both of Him

We are going to see Jesus. Both of Him. 

Before we go, I sit and wait on the brown leather sofa. The sofa fits three small people or two big people. I am alone on the sofa and I don’t take up the space of three people or even two. Nobody sits beside me, they never do.

I sit on the brown leather looking across the coffee table, and across the grey sofa on the other side of the coffee table to the white bookcase backed up against the wall. Mam says the bookcase is a mess. The mess a strumpet makes, she says.

Mam can’t read because she’s blind but she knows a mess when she touches it. The bookcase has seven shelves. Each one is split in two by a central vertical partition. 

Jesus, both of Him, says there’s only one book. This proves both of Him have never been to this apartment.

This bookcase has 119 books, four cards with slogans on them, a painting the size of a large box of chocolates, and a game of Jaws. That’s Jaws with the upper case.  Jaws is on the top shelf. I can’t reach the Jaws game, even standing on tiptoes on the highest bit of the grey sofa. 

Mam has jaws with the lower case. Jesus, both of Him, might have jaws but I don’t know for sure as I haven’t met them yet. 

There’s a book on the fourth shelf from the top. It lies flat on its side and it’s called Ducks Newburyport. It’s a blue and white book. The fact that the book is lying on its side is an important mystery. 

Jesus lay on his side with Him beside him but there’s no more facts about that because the disciples didn’t write about it. 

I sit staring at all the books. Why did a strumpet take the time to disorder them? There are blue books and red books and white books and green books and a wooden angel the size of my palm with blond wooden hair and a red wooden dress but no jaws, not even a painted mouth.  

A tall bald man in yellow socks serves us chamomile tea in a transparent glass teapot. Dead yellow flower heads float about inside the pot. The man forgets the cups. There are no yellow books on the shelves, not even one. Nobody tells the man to bring cups. 

My bare knees quiver and shake because I am still on the sofa and I want to get going to see Jesus, both of Him.

Beneath my feet, the carpet is grey. It is covered in legs of chairs and tables. Some of the legs are short and some are long. All of them are wooden. None of them have feet. If they had feet they’d walk straight out of this apartment. Down seven floors in the lift. Straight out into the street to the bus terminus. The carpet would be left behind, with the bookcase and the books and the strumpet’s disorder.

I could say there’s a forest of chair legs and table legs but that would be a metaphor and Auntie Lorna says metaphors are showing off and she slaps the faces of show-offs leaving their cheeks crimson and their eyes bloodshot and watery. 

The painting the size of a large chocolate box is on the second shelf from the top on the right. It leans against disordered books. The painting, without a frame, is pale blue and pale violet and pale pink and pale mauve. Auntie Lorna calls this type of painting a bloody mess. I don’t let my eyes rest on the painting but I see it all the same.

I twist my head to look behind me. I look out of the small dirty window. Beyond the window is a street with apartments the same as this one. The apartments are close but I can’t see into them. The snow is silent, grimy. Snow flakes stick to the dirty window and slide down the glass. I want to wipe them away but the window doesn’t open.

Mam says it’s time. The bald man says, no really, no rush. Auntie Lorna stands up, ties her headscarf beneath her chin. Mam says, yes, it’s time. Time to get up and put your shoes on and your coat on to go and see Jesus, both of Him. Mam doesn’t actually say ‘both of Him’. Mam doesn’t know yet that Jesus has a twin. 

I don’t tell Mam I don’t have shoes. Or a coat.

Categories
exercise

Sing any hymn you like

It was a herring gull – sing any hymn you like.

Gull leads to landfill. Landfill leads to leaching. Leaching leads to leprechauns.

The herring gull poking around the misfits and, of the course, the bluetits soaking around in bloodbaths and, of course, the charlatans croaking about their titbits.

My herring gull is blue, shrieking blue on hue. 

Remember the day the colony fled, trash cans fled, landfills fled, toxic pools bled out?

Pluck the herring gull – or else! 

Gull flies, gull sighs, gull dies. 

Gull feathers as calamitous and ratchety and barbarous as a barbarous and ratchety and calamitous three-tier wedding cake. 

Herring gull! 

On the contrary, the gulls colonise, and we, we just stop and stand and stare up, fixated, locked in awe in shock, and the gulls, well they just quip on colonising. 

Grateful the gull, for her razor clams. Grateful the gull, for her Saturday night chips’n’brown sauce. Grateful the gull, for her red diamante dot.

Chips chips chips chips! This comely gull would jab at nothing more, nothing less.

The tall gull struts as the small gull shimmies and the middling gull ruminates.

Who are they who have trapped us in our apartments? The Herring Gulls. Who are they who have stormed our parliament, spaffed all over our decrees? The Herring Gulls.

All in all, they aren’t bad at soaring.

No, we mustn’t speak of it. The portly selkies that slithered up and out of the sea in the dark. That smashed up the eggs in every nest in Beach Lane. Shards of shell and spatters of yellow yolk all over the shop. No, there’ll be no mention of this, no mention at all. 

Herring gulls, paddling up lugworms. Kittiwakes, scoring contours across a soldering sky. Sanderlings, jostling one another’s dainty damp feet. Dog walkers, stooping to scoop up shit. 

The birder, out birding, snared the bird. He closed his eyes as he did it, but couldn’t block the sounds. Snap crack crunch.

And she, in her freckled winter plumage, lived off road kill and offal and grass seeds and orange peel and apple cores and starling chicks and song thrush eggs and voles and shrews and beetles and slugs and ants and mackerel and crabs and mussels and really anything that wriggled or sparkled.

A gull in a band is worth two in a rush.

Are we nearly there, yet? Absoherringgulllutely. 

All over Scotland herring gulls breed chicks and rebellion.

Image by Daniel VanWart.

Categories
exercise poetry

Sentenced

Connecting birds, he thinks she said, saying it was all connections, not that he feels selected, not with that bruised feeling not the healing he hopes for, but that said, they have this something this voluminous vertiginous fissure of affliction that keeps them both distant and entwined, only she is distant and he, tall and abrasive for his age, connected to her by a ravelled thread a reckoning a blessing almost, he alone is entwined in the ribbons of her, tangled up in the fantasy of her as someone else entirely, nonetheless she isn’t rude doesn’t slap him down not in public at least, whereas in the bathroom (him naked her naked) the way her lip curls as a parcel bow scissored is no gift, he knows, no sirree, he knows as well as anyone else she blames herself as he blames himself, his lame attempt to take the shame, drape himself in it, a cloak of disgrace his just desserts, but then it isn’t him that’s dead but Sonny, Sonny the name that shall not be mentioned, even the shrine on the kitchen cabinet bears no plaque no card no image no black rimmed lettering, just a violet jittery candle with a flame that will not rest, of course back in the day grief tore couples apart, too, split them asunder, an axe through a log, a fish eviscerated, and so he reminisces (eyes half closed) about the old days the gold gays of obtuse rainbows of crocks of bold and he would (if he only could be arsed), compare them historically to those couples who stayed the course despite the odds, although this may not be true for the Mr and Mrs whose fox cub went under a steam train, or the Mr and Mrs whose dachshund went poof! in a cloud of ash, remember spontaneous combustion? he does she doesn’t, conversely she believes in fairies, the gossamer kind all lace and no snickers, and somehow her naive notion of elfin folk ignites their furious disagreements about communists (there isn’t much left not even righteous left between them now), by the same token they split the electricity bill forty sixty he paying sixty what with being taller and more abrasive for his age, correspondingly she rinses forty sixty of the dishes, her slavish desire for cleanliness fractured by her fury over his height his slights the way he picks his teeth with the cherub handled olive pick and Sonny not even cold in his grave.

Categories
exercise Flash fiction

Mandarin Dream

On tiptoes on the second to top rung of the wooden ladder pushed up against the tree trunk with the twist of wire in a sweating palm reaching stretching reaching checking every piece of fruit, rejecting those too small, plucking those that fit neat through the hooped wire, dropping them into the canvas basket clung around my neck. Flies all over my mouth. Burn all over my bare flesh. Am I allowed to pick the hard half green ones if they fit? Forgot to ask. Look at the other pickers, can’t see through the prism of mean. Size, twist, pick, drop, size, reject, size, reject, size, reject, size, twist, pick, drop, size, reject reject reject reject. Earn what you pick. Pick what you ken. Someone singing Waltzing Matilda in a German accent nine feet up. Canvas strap too tight chaffing around my neck. Basket not even a quarter full already. Baby blue seersucker shorts gapping at my behind. Ruined. Picker’s crack. Someone yelling shut up shut up bloody oath mate, you’re murdering it! nine feet up. German Matilda waltzing a stutter. Swabbing the sweat off my cheeks with my red cotton bandana looped around my wrist. Flies in amongst my teeth.Turn to watch the others skipping up and down their ladders with their full baskets and their grubby cricket hats and their long sleeves and their long pants marching to the central crates emptying their baskets trotting back, how are they doing that, so fast, what’s wrong with me? Inhale the leaves with their sweet oily citrus scent. Red tractor gulping down diesel, farting out reek. Twenty of us, maybe. Fifteen on the ladders, two overseeing the crates in the centre of the row, two in the tractor, foreman smoking a roll-up under his squalid Akubra hat. Young Israeli on the next tree but one given up, spreadeagled on his back in the dirt, laughing and pointing at the boiled sun, shirt rolled up to his armpits, livid purple scar trekking between nipples burnt. They’re all too small my mandarins, they’ve given me the weakest tree. Bastards. Earth head earth spinning, trees turning to sky turning to dust turning to orange to not enough money. 

Foreman shouting something about lunch. Climbing down, steady now steady. Leant up against the trunk in the jumbled shade eating peanut butter and jam on curled up bread.  And flying ants. Gulping sweet lemon squash from a glass milk bottle. 

Later, he soothes me, the German man, lie still little cat, he whispers, fingers pressing in on my blushing shoulders, his head tucked low beneath the upper bunk. $25 for 12 hours work. Not a tenth of what the Vietnam vets earn. I don’t even know his name. Aloe vera bubbling and spitting as he smears it over my my brazed neck and calves. Blood rushing to my face hanging off the bed staring at the squeezed out Aloe leaves scattered about the wooden floor with pull twists and metal bottle tops and two silver empty condom wrappers. Nobody said you don’t use the sizer to actually size the mandarins, it’s just a guide, now I know.

The fastest pickers are the Vietnam vets, his mate on the stool across from the bunks says. Take a leaf out of their book.

On my belly and his hand stretching into where it shouldn’t and I want to say no, no but no words come and and his bare left toes toy with an empty Aloe leaf lift release lift release.

You’d be better off in the packing shed, sweetheart, the mate on the stool says. Orchard’s for the big girls.

His heavy hand reaching, sizing, twisting, picking.

Their body hair grows through their jeans, what with them never taking them off, not even in the sea, them Vietnam vets, the mate on the stool says.

How do I get in the packing shed, I ask the floor, pushing my belly down through the mattress, pushing me away from him.

Girl on the upper bunk leans over, dangles her arm, strokes his hair, chipped blue nail varnish, tattoo of a tiger on her palm. 

Gotta prove yourself, she says. 

He sits up, bangs his head on the upper bunk, rubs his scalp.

Fuck this, he says, climbing the ladder up to her. Stuck to his sole the Aloe leaf, a prism of clean. 

Categories
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.