Category: writing

Raspberry Origami

Aye, he can do it alright. Practicing hour after hour in his mother’s bedroom mirror. The vanity mirror above the scrawl of lipsticks and powderpuffs and rusting rings and the jingling bangles tied together with a baby blue plastic crucifix.

He sits on the velveteen stool with its bandy legs, hunched forward, his face dead centre, steaming the mirror, lips pursed, a pout, a scrunch of his forehead, a deep inbreath, jaws tight, hands on hips, a further lean in, and brrrrrrrrrr. Blows the perfect potted raspberry. Again and again. Two minutes between each one. The two minutes break is important although he no longer remembers why.

He doesn’t tell the rest of them. The gang. Jesus they would kill him, not for the raspberries, they love the bloody raspberries, heh Kent, go on, look at the copper, rasp him, mate, rasp him! No they’d crucify him for the practising, the urging on of his facial facias, the vanity mirror, his thin boned hands on his thin boned hips.

‘What are you doing up there, Kent?’ His mother’s voice hovers up the stairwell, drifts into the bedroom. The words barely make it; his mother is tired.

‘You in my room again.’ It’s not a question.

‘I’m not, Mum.’ Kent stands up, shakes his head, and turns for the door. Takes a last look at the mirror and pulls his lips in over his teeth. Two new freckles above his lip. He searches for something to blot them out, finds a dried-up concealer stick and rubs it across his skin. Now he looks like he’s diseased. No tissues anywhere. He rubs at it with his sweater sleeve. Jumps down the stairs three at a time. Blows a raspberry at his school photo that’s pinned to the hall wall at a jaunty angle with a red tack.

Kent is fourteen. He has facial fluff and growing pains and feet that are too big for his legs and cheek bones born of angels. Kent is an only child of an only parent in the only house without a hedge in the only street without street lights in the only suburb without a bus or a train or even any hint of a promise of a levelling-up.

Other kids do fags like Kent does only. He picks up only and rolls it between his fingers, holds it up to his mouth, sucks, breathes in deep and coughs and splutters.

When Kent’s only mother is at work in the club she tells men to fuck off and tells women to keep their titties in their blouses there’ll be none of that round here. There’s no voice-hovering with these exhaltations. Titties and fuck offs are forbidden in the only house without a hedge, though, and Kent whines that it’s unfair and his mother says there’s nothing fair about this world now eat the bran flakes to keep your ‘tines rigorous.

Kent learnt the raspberries off his mother and his mother learnt origami off Youtube. The only street without buses is also the only street without the drone drops. Does his mother steal the coloured card that comes in packs of a hundred, ten sheets each of ten rainbow colours? There’s no money for meat so how come there’s money for origami paper and how does it arrive without the drones?

As it’s Sunday, and his mother isn’t working, they sit together in the room with the table, folding the thick clean-smelling card. Out in the street, there’s a drive-by shooting. The walls shiver and they turn their heads briefly to look through the lined shadows of the window security bars, then return to the folding, eyes down, nails carefully scrubbed and trimmed. You have to respect the paper, his mother always says. Clean hands make mean origami.

Pink flapping cranes pop out of Kent’s hands and stalk across the broken television and step down the piles of old music magazines. The cranes do not have eyes but they see, Kent is sure of it.

Bethany, Kent’s mother, sits on the floor, her legs long, her eyes crossed, her fingers deft and magic. She twists orange dragons and green wizards and glorious bulbous crimson toads. She uses the wrong coloured card for the right kind of mystery and blows a raspberry at Kent for every finished creature.

Kent folds a kitten out of brown card that will lie on his hard pillow behind his head at night and purr and purr and purr as Kent hides his heart from the livid bloody blasts that rampage across the night city.

The tap tap tap at the window is all yellow beak and irridescent feathers. Small. Persistent. Bethany looks up at the bird and back to the dove taking shape in her hands. She hasn’t seen a live bird in months. Not since Kent’s birthday. Even then, she’d only caught the shadow, and afterwards, had doubted she’d seen anything live at all.

‘Look, love,’ she says to Kent. ‘The poor wee thing is blowing raspberries.’

This piece was from a two word prompt exercise: raspberries and origami.

exercise writing

Greyfriars Bobby

In this constraint writing exercise I typed out the first chapter of Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, but removed all the sentences that did not start with ‘he’ or ‘Bobby’. The purpose of the exercise is to consider sentence structures, and how we might vary them. While removing many of the sentences changes the meaning of the original text, and in this case, results in a loss of whole scenes, it is still possible to understand the gist of the story.

He was only a little country dog – the very youngest and smallest and shaggiest of Skye terriers – bred on a heathery slope of the Pentland hills, where the loudest sound was the bark of a collie or the tinkle of a sheep bell. Bobby had heard it many times, and he never failed to yelp a sharp protest at the outrage to his ears: but as the gunshot was always followed by a certain happy event, it started in his active little mind a train of pleasant associations. Bobby knew, as well as any man, that it was the dinner hour. He did not know the face of death and, a merry little ruffian of a terrier, he was ready for any adventure.

He had learned that by bitter experience. He could go no farther himself, but the laddies took up the pursuit, yelling like Highland clans of old in a foray across the border. Bobby dashed back, barking furiously, in pure exuberance of spirits. He tumbled gaily over grassy hummocks, frisked saucily around terrifying old mausoleums, wriggled under the most enticing of low set table tombs and sprawled exhausted but still happy and noisy at Auld Jock’s feet.

He learned that he might chase rabbits, squirrels, and moor fowl, and sea gulls and whaups that came up to feed in ploughed fields. He was no lady’s lapdog. Bobby had the leavings of a herring or a haddie; for a rough little Skye will eat anything from smoked fish to moor-fowl eggs, and he had the tidbit of a farthing bone to worry at his leisure.

He might have been carried to the distant farm and shut safely in the byre with the cows for the night, but for an incautious remark of the farmer. Bobby pricked his drop ears. He yelped at the crash of the gun, but it was another matter altogether that set his little heart to palpitating with alarm.

Bobby stood stock still for an instant.

Bobby forgot to dine that day, first in his distracted search, and then in his joy of finding his master. Bobby barked as if he would burst his lungs. He barked so long, so loud, and so furiously, running round and round the car and under it and yelping at every turn, that a latternly scullery maid opened a door and angrily bade him no to deave folk wi his blatterin. Bobby’s feathered tail drooped, but it still quivered, all ready to wag again at the slightest encouragement.

Tags exercises

exercise writing

Periodic snippets

She hadn’t meant to do it, hadn’t noticed that her feet had fed her into the church, into the dark stray mauve of the granite slabs, up the blotched red of the worn carpeted aisle between the pews, up to the coffin sat aloof on its wooden bier, but she opened the lid anyway, and in she climbed.

It wasn’t the first time she’d lied to him, but the strength of the lie, the sheer unadulterated outrage of it was a shock even to her on her first full day in the cellar of the convent, shackled.

The frog was not from here, not with those iridescent turquiose spots, the pearl pink toes, the foreign croak, but she wasn’t xenophobic, no sirree, and so she popped it into her mouth, and swallowed.

She was driving, one hand on the wheel, the other hand lipsticking, Trevor the toddler screaming in the back, the rain swimming across the windscreen, when they announced it on the radio, her husband George was born again.

exercise writing

Periodic Proverbs

Two writing exercises; one on periodic sentences and one on reworking a proverb.

Periodic Sentences

He stood under the tree, sheltering from the wind the rain his trammelled mind, and ate his shoe.

She passed through aisle after aisle, cat food for the seven plus, shampoo for nits and scales, she stared at her reflection in the coolers, she listened to the hum and throng, she frowned at the whines and shrieks of dragging toddlers, and then she saw it, tucked behind the pyramid of half-price sweetcorn, a home-made bomb.

He was only three, skipping down the pavement, his mother shouting on her phone, his sister playing hopskotch, when he accidently stepped on a crack, and disappeared.

Molly and Maureen were selling cockles and mussels from a wheelbarrow, singing Alive Alive O, hoiking their spits and hoisting their petticoats, when, from ten storeys above them, a thirteen tonne dragon fell.

From the upstairs bathroom window, little Tommy watched the little bird that went to sleep early and woke up early and flew down to the lawn and pecked up the little pink worm and hopped this way and that, and sang a little song and Tommy squinted his rogue eye, raised his catapult, and shot it.

Reworking a proverb

The early bird catches the worm.

If you push your way to the front, you’ll get what you want but folk will holler.

The starling is the woodpecker’s competitor and, with the collapse of the starling population, the woodpecker is making a comeback, especially in the morning on the birdfeeder.

Get up early to win.

Long sleepers are big losers.

Better the raucous ring of an alarm than a growling belly.

A rich man leaps like a salmon in the pink pools of dawn.

Late is slovenly, late is starving.

I’ll pick you up at six tomorrow morning, the Asda worm sale starts at seven and there’ll be dangerous queues.

The bird that goes to sleep early and wakes up early gets to the lawn first, gets the first worm and is never hungry, nor is he popular with his compatriots.

exercise fiction writing

Perspective

This writing exercise is based on an exhibition by Lea Gulditte Hestelund at Overgaden in 2018, and the Olga Ravn’s subsequent novel, The Employees.

The Cleaner

I overheard someone calling it a Minion. I see it now. It’s the colour and shape, the oval of the omeprazole capsules that Hamid takes for his irritated belly. I think it’s more like a halter. A donkey’s halter, in pale yellow, slipper soft leather. It’s for a human head, not a donkey’s, and that’s creepy. We don’t know it’s for a human head but that’s my best guess. It isn’t fitted over a head, just a clear perspex dome. I don’t like it, especially at five in the morning when there’s nobody about. The lower straps would cover a person’s mouth. Even a donkey’s mouth is let free. Minions are creepy too, the way they get about all together dressed the same with their deranged eyes and their tilted mocking laughs. I overheard the shift manager calling us minions in the tearoom. He thought I wouldn’t understand. Or maybe he knew exactly. He was picking his nose when he said it. I was emptying the coffee machine. Pushing the damp dark grains into the food compost bin and breathing in the thick woody scent. He flicked the snot onto the floor. The artist came in one day. A string of people followed her in white gloves. She asked me about cleaning her object. Did I use the little brush I’d been provided with? She blinked a lot when she spoke and looked over my shoulder. Then she thanked me for my work and gave me a paper bag of croissants on her way out. One of them’s half eaten, she said, you can throw it away if you like, I won’t be offended.

The Security Guard

They don’t know how long to stand in front of it without moving on to the next one. They look about to see who’s looking. But they all stand longer in front of this one than the others. Especially the women. They frown when they look at it and they touch their lips with their sparkling painted nails. One of them actually started crying. Dabbed her eyes with a tissue she pulled out of her handbag then tried to hand it to me to put in the bin. There’s no bins in here, she said, sweeping the tissue around the curve of the gallery with a tanned bare arm. So where I am supposed to find one then, I didn’t say. Actually, it’s my favourite piece in the exhibition. It doesn’t have a name none of them do. It’s definitely for prisoners, for women likely given the colour. They would use black on men. Or grey. Must be to gag them. Some of them need gagged right enough. But not like that. Women are right to stick up for their rights. Reckon its something to do with that cancel culture. Everything is these days. No one out protesting yet but they’ll be here sure as day turns to night and night to day. Last exhibition they were all out screaming and chanting and throwing coloured flour about the place. Half of them with purple hair. Or green. Rings in their noses. The other half older men in suits with pink frothing faces and jowls laddering down their necks. Even got my picture in the news trying to keep them apart. My mother cut the piece out of the newspaper and pressed it between two old magazines. The headline said Choreographed Cancel Culture. What does it mean? my mother asked. She’s proud of me, my mother.

The Woman Visitor

I’ve been three times now and I can’t stop staring. I want to reach inside the case and touch it the way you’d check a lump on the back of your neck to see whether it’s growing or not. It’s leather, the colour of October oak leaves. If I say bondage would you think less of me? But bondage is wrong – it’s not dominatrix stuff. It’s a silencer. Allows her to see but not to speak. Allows her to sniff but not to yawn. Why do I think it’s for a woman? The artist is a woman. She’s telling us about women being silenced. Or she’s doing the silencing. One woman silencing another. Does she want to silence her, the artist? Of course. You only have to look at Twitter. Women rounding on each other like serpents. Trolling and wounding. The strap that goes up over the head that keeps the whole thing in place has long slim pockets. You could keep pencils in those pockets, coloured and sharp or blunt black, the harness comes with no explanation no instructions. What do they let her do, we wonder? What does she draw with the pencils that she cannot say out loud?

The Student

Look at that one over there. The amber one with studs. Studs have more than one meaning. Take your pick. That’s a head alright. Empty-headed. The straps must cover the mouth. Unless you turn it round. But what would be the point of that? How do they know if it’s on too tight? Hannibal Lechter didn’t state a preference for colour but if he had he would have picked scarlett November for the metal taste he left on her tongue. Behind, at the back of the head, there’s a thronged strap, pigtail length, fringed at the end, a grabber for the controller. How we scream at those old movies with the fringed leather jackets on the boys that strut their stuff puffed up preening themselves in car windows while wiping yellow shite off their shoes. The studs that keep the whole thing together are not neat, people are not neat, they are rowdy when pricked antagonised demonised anonymised why waste time with neat when you’re trying to buckle them up.

The Object

We are here for you to relate to our bodies in many different forms and positions – bodies that may seem strange to you. Through spatial staging, the artist enters the viewer’s own body, thereby adding an additional layer of experience to the exhibition’s theme. We hold our secrets behind the tamped skins of pigs and spit inward the moment you move on.

Tags art, gallieries, objects, perspectives

writing

The launch

The launch

I write. I cycle. I write. I limp. I watch, listen, touch. I study small things. I gnaw on big things. I write more. Endings are difficult. Beginnings are easy. I worry. About sentence structures. Rhythm. Climate chaos. I write less. I read. I sit still. I scoop crab shells out of gutterings. I draw sparkling starlings perched on red chimney pots with a finger on steamy glass. Who doesn’t smile at a scooting sanderling?