Tag: lipogram

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.

Tags lipogram

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).

Tags lipogram

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.

Tags lipogram