Newbie

<p style=”background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 21.0pt 0cm;”>These three pieces are all so interesting and satisfying, and such good uses of ‘electricity’ that, as usual, I’ve struggled to decide on a winner because the standard is so high. I’m intrigued by how something as impersonal and powerful as electricity has resulted in intimate pieces,…[Read more]

Energy and shame

Understanding is a difficult word sometimes. We say, ‘I understand her,’ meaning that we know her reasons for doing something or other. It was as expected. Electricity feels rather different. Do I understand it? I mean, what is it? I was taught a load of rubbish at school about the movement of charged electrons. That isn’t elect…[Read more]

Electricity and us

Electricity has played a considerable part in directing  the path our lives have travelled, from the instant (if only sensory) flash of knowledge, at the end of our first date, that “This man is who I can safely be ME with!” to our fifty years of living in the North East.

At that time (5th April 1963) he worked for a comp…[Read more]

Hunting The Children of Electric

You may think we’ve harnessed electricity but don’t be fooled by its compliance, it’s merely an angry beast straining at its leash, longing to be free.

If you’ve stood watching for the crackle-flash of its untamed brother, then counted and listened for the rumble, you’ll know what I mean when I say, the effec…[Read more]

Thanks for the comp, Ath! Another opportunity to stretch myself ☺️

And congratulations to Libby for winning, and the rest of us for giving it a go ????

Thank you, Ath! That was a lovely surprise. The standard of the other entries was so high. Thank you to Terrie, Sandra and Seagreen for such evocative and immersive stories.

A most enjoyable writing challenge for May, Ath.
Well done Libby, Sandra and Sea for creating such powerfully expressive reading.
Looking forward to Libby’s June challenge.

Thank you Ath, both for the competition and for your encouraging summing up. I certainly would’ve been hard-pressed to choose a winner, so congratulations and thanks to Libby, and also to Terrie and Seagreen.

Why do you always insist on making this difficult?

Terrie’s Plant Song is almost a poem to the language of flowers. Rich and ancient with a deadly heart. The melody, she writes, is intoxicating, and I can’t think of a better word for the whole piece. I said “anything floral” and it’s hard to imagine something more floral than this. A wonderfully…[Read more]

THE GATEKEEPER  

They closed the Winter Gardens. Lack of funding or resources or some other bullshit excuse. Redundancy notices for the gardeners who’d been there for years, and redeployment to grass-cutting duties for the young apprentices who still didn’t know their aquilegia from their allium. They stored the tools in the old stable buil…[Read more]

Phototropism

Suzy and I drank white wine while we sat in stiff, square garden chairs. I hadn’t met Suzy before and admired how she leant back, legs stretched out – lounging and confident. She wasn’t just overcoming the chair’s straight edges; she showed me she knew she had glamour. Her jeans and yellow cotton shirt were years old, threads loose…[Read more]

(This may well be missing the point)

The language of flowers not always sweet

Only after finding, (months later)  photographs other than the ones taken by fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Kally Logan that caused all the trouble did Luke Darbyshere register flowers had twice been fleetingly present on his wedding day. Much of the time he’d been su…[Read more]

Plant-Song

Nepenthes, the watcher, teaches us to listen for murmurs along the grapevine because the scent of those words is strong and always carry seeds of the truth. They whisper tales of creation that began beneath woody crowns of ancient cycad trees and of cerebral vines, trailing and probing in thickly netted curls upon the loamy earth.

The…[Read more]

Thank you, Seagreen, for the competition. Great, enticing stories from Ath, Sandra and Terrie. I enjoyed them all.

Sea, thank you for the useful challenge, especially because it helped me formulate my character as well as sparking such a brilliant range of responses; I wouldn’t’ve liked to choose a winner.

Seagreen, thanks so much. A brilliant prompt for April. Thanks also to my co-authors. There were some great pieces of writing.