@libby
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A quick reminder that there’s a fortnight left for this month’s competition. Details:
For the October competition please write on any theme and include in your story two or more of the following words:
Uniform (as a noun or adjective)
Cumulus
Television
Mood
Spanner
500 words max, deadline midnight 31st October.
Thank you @Athelstone , and thanks also to Jill, Sandra and Seagreen for kind and encouraging comments.
Thank you @Seagreen ! The prompt was a challenge, in a good way, and I’m very pleased to have been picked from such a strong collection of stories.
Care Package
450 words
Her brother and she were the youngest of five, he the youngest of all.
“Follow me!” he called, pedalling hard. To keep up, when he was eight and she nine, stole her breath. Also, there were more interesting things to do: reading a book, doing piano practice. Soul-bolstering things. Becoming your own person.
Ahead, her brother fell off his bike onto the grass verge. He lifted his palm. “I’m bleeding!” She looked. A surface graze, redness but no oozing blood. Pitiful. And at home, stupid teenage sisters who talked only to each other. Parents who’d grown out of wanting children, leaving her with her brother without checking if she minded.
Banging the piano keys helped.
**
She is sitting at a table opposite a police detective.
“Tell me about the fall,” he says.
“My brother was hurrying to get to work, slipped on the stairs. Banged his head against the wall.”
It was ten years ago, her brother thirty-eight.
“Who found him?” said the detective.
The detective surely knew this. The police had all her brother’s medical records.
“I did,” she says. “His office rang me as next of kin. They were wondering where he was. I rang for an ambulance.”
“Were you alarmed?”
“Of course.” She frowns at this man who is her own age, old enough to understand but being obtuse. “Though I didn’t know his brain was damaged or that injuries can get worse over time.” She hears her rising anger and tones it back down. “I didn’t push him down the stairs.”
“You picked up the pieces.”
She stares. Fools make statements of the bloody obvious.
Out of hospital her brother had no job, didn’t know what to eat or how to cross a road. Their parents were dead, the other sisters too busy, blah blah. Lapidary memories of their excuses. “You work from home. He can live with you.” “There’ll be help from social services.”
His metabolism changed. He gained weight; the local council’s budget for home care slimmed. He developed diabetes, sore joints, breathing difficulties, bad-tempered mood changes. She applied for help to community groups and charities, first asking how to fill in their forms. The sisters offered inconsistent aid plus their bafflement that everything wasn’t easier. Every day brought her an expenditure of energy that would never be regained.
But his pill regime. A little bit of experimentation. Altered doses. One day he didn’t wake up.
**
The detective is inscrutable. She feels tighter for taking control yet frayed at what’s happened. The detective seems like a wooden post in seawater, one on which oysters make a home.
“Will there be a library in prison?” she says.
“Yes.”
“A piano?”
“Possibly. You might be lucky.”
I realised after I pressed send that the POVs of your three characters responded to the three possible POVs I’d put in my comp task. Neat!
As befits pieces about holidays and sea, all this month’s entries evoked a sense of place and, in their different ways, the rituals of leaving home for time away.
A lovely interweaving of different memories focused on the annual seaside holiday. Your depictions are very atmospheric, such as, “We would stand in the corridor and eagerly await the first glimpse of [the sea] as the powerful engine pulled the carriages…” Then the piece widens out to consider different kinds of seas before resettling with “a kindly sea … source of quiet contemplation.” There’s an appealing sense of a wider world. I’d never heard of Goodrington. It looks lovely!
I enjoyed hearing the viewpoint of someone who’d grown up by the sea. It’s a piece about a sense of home as much as of holiday, and ‘Orientation’ is a good title. You include the interesting thought that the concept of ‘holiday’ isn’t the fixed thing so many of us think it is, but is something to be set against whatever else is happening in life. It gave me things to think about.
An intriguing, atmospheric northbound journey that captures the emotional pull ‘the north’ can have, whatever part of the world that represents. For this character the travel is not just a holiday but a personal necessity. The changing geography is shown very effectively and I liked the mix of the practical and psychological needs, the sense that the character will, we hope, keep doing this journey well into the future. And I smiled a thumbs up for including Barry Manilow.
This polyphonic story uses its three characterful voices very effectively to propel the narrative. As the baton is handed on, we learn more about poor John. There’s also a small but strong extra layer in hints of the priest’s bereavement over the declining worshippers. I liked how the opening and end tie together to give not just a twist but a deeper depiction of John’s mental state and a question of how he will cope if he realises what really happened.
As usual it’s hard to pick a winner. Seagreen, the September competition is in your care.
A quick reminder that the end of the month is growing near for anyone who’d like to enter the monthly competition.
August, peak holiday season. For the August comp please combine the themes of holiday and sea. It could be from the point of view of a holidaymaker or a person who works in the tourist industry or someone who simply observes.
500 words max, deadline midnight 31st August.
We’re half way through August. The heat isn’t a great supporter of creativity. On the other hand it could be a prompt. Here’s a reminder of this month’s competition.
August, peak holiday season. For the August comp please combine the themes of holiday and sea. It could be from the point of view of a holidaymaker or a person who works in the tourist industry or someone who simply observes.
500 words max, deadline midnight 31st August.
Thank you, Ath! Thanks also for your comments and careful reading of my story – always helpful for an author. And thanks to Jill, Sandra and Terrie for such evocative, enjoyable pieces.
Fuel
(385 words)
At dawn she was in the kitchen, a follow-on to hours of restlessness, the turning over under heavy blankets, a heart driven to pump quicker than usual, a fluttery stomach. She was sixteen. It was a relief to get up and do something.
The first person downstairs each morning had to check the Aga. The temperature gauge on its cream enamel front was a horizontal thermometer, like one placed under a patient’s tongue. But this gauge was fixed against a panel, a painted tricolour: black, white, red, meaning too cold, hot, too hot. She looked. The heat of the great rectangular lump of cast iron was in the white section but not as high as the line that demarked an ideal heat. Every morning the Aga needed more anthracite.
The house was quiet. She did nothing. It was easy to dream instead of work. A slip into pleasure. That boy, arriving yesterday with the builder who was putting a sunroom at the back of the house where potted geraniums and cacti would live. The boy was an apprentice who seemed to know a lot already: how to mix mortar, how to lay bricks in perfect rows. How difficult it had been not to watch his smooth movements, his long limbs, his quickness when the builder asked for something – a trowel, a brush, or their lunchtime sandwiches. And how awful, terrible, to have been seen watching – face-scorching bad, cheeks burning even now at the thought. So she’d gone to the lounge at the front of the house, tried to read and not strain to hear the builder and the boy talking. Then Mum had told her to take mugs of tea out to them. They’d thanked her, both smiled. The smiles hadn’t meant anything except that it was time for their break – smiles for themselves, that was all.
In the kitchen she raised the hot-plate cover and, with the special handle, lifted out the plug of iron at the hot-plate’s centre. Next: the effort of heaving up the hod of anthracite, tipping pieces over its curved lip onto yesterday’s embers. She put the plug back. Slowly the gauge rose. Had it ever reached the red section, dangerously hot? It was tempting to add more fuel, just for temporary companionship, the anthracite making heat in the dark.
Congratulations, Jill. A lovely story – and the song which inspired it is lovely too. I’ll be singing it all day 🙂
Thanks for setting the comp, Sandra. Congratulations also to Ath and Terrie.
My Birthdays, My Parents’ Wedding Anniversaries
‘Got to get you into my life!’ sings Mum. She and Dad have brought me, newborn, from the hospital. She sits at the kitchen table, cradling me, delivering the loud lullaby.
Or so she tells me, when I’m seven. We’re at the table again. I say, ‘I was already in your life. In your tummy and then outside it.’
I’m a literal-minded daughter.
‘I know, but it was exciting!’ she says. ‘And that song was in the charts.’
That was September 1966 and Mum was twenty and married for exactly a year.
‘I loved it. The words, the saxophones. So gutsy,’ she says and blurts, ‘Pa-pa-pa-pah, dah dah!’
I try to pick out the tune but can’t.
Mum is always eager about life. This is mysterious. I like circumspection.
‘What else did you sing?’ I know the answer but we’re in our routine now.
‘”All Or Nothing.”’
That is because, I realise when I’m seven, she fancied the singer who has elfin looks like her own and is nearly as pretty.
*
My father has a square face and a nose thickened by breakages. They met at a dance. ‘Your Dad’s a fine dancer, a nifty mover,’ she has told me more than once.
I make a deduction I’m proud of and pipe up, ‘That’s nifty cos of the boxing.’
‘Yep,’ she says.
*
There are photos of Dad in the ring, a welterweight winning amateur matches. Not quite good enough to turn professional. ‘Not keen enough on the hard work,’ Mum says.
*
In our bathroom I talk to Dad while he’s shaving. In his pyjama bottoms and a towel round his neck he leans over the basin.
‘What’s on at school today then?’ he says, lathered jaw twisted.
‘Dancing class.’ I like the rhythms of dancing.
He finishes with the razor, wipes his face with the towel and turns to face me. ‘Dancing,’ he says, and bounces from side to side on the balls of his feet.
I laugh.
*
I’m eight, setting the table while Mum makes cottage pie. Dad will be home soon. I ask Mum why Dad, an electrician, doesn’t work in people’s houses.
‘The money’s better in offices. And he can’t resist the scent of Tippex.’
‘What’s Tippex?’
‘It’s something a typist uses if she hits the wrong key. With a little brush she paints some Tippex over the mistake so it disappears, the paper is white again. It smells like cleaning fluid.’
*
At school, in English class, we learn about metaphor, but only in our set texts. The teacher doesn’t say it’s something you keep learning in real life. Nor, of course, does she tell us how marriages work, what feeds mutual attraction. That would be too personal and too oblique for the school syllabus.
*
I start a habit of reflection, contemplating, for example, Mum’s use of the word ‘nifty.’ My birthdays keep coming round and so does Mum and Dad’s anniversary. They keep marking out their moves and spaces, their dance with each other.
498 words excluding title
The two records were Top 10 hits in September 1966:
I’ve Got to Get You Into My Life, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSL73EupKHQ
All Or Nothing, The Small Faces
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa6rZjJ43Js
Everything else in the story is fiction
Thanks, Ath. I haven’t read Charlotte’s Web. It sounds rather traumatic and I’m a wimp about animals. Animal Farm was so long ago at school (did we even read the whole thing?) that I was thinking I should read it again. Beasts of England by Adam Biles, a recent version of Animal Farm, was interesting, worth reading.
I hope you’re able to enjoy some books while you’re convalescing!
Hi Ath, this is great good news. What a relief it must be. I hope you’re able to resolve the remaining issues. I hope you can get out and about a bit too, especially now the weather is improving.
Take care.
Heavens, Ath! I’m glad you (and Mrs Ath) are now recovering. Thank you for telling us what you’ve been through. Take care and take it easy.
Congratulations, Terrie! What a wonderful story. Loved it.
Thank you, Janette, for stepping in. Btw does Ath know he doesn’t have to worry about judging?
That’s a great shame. All best wishes to Ath.
How about finding another judge?
Could anyone else reading this be willing to judge the comp? Five delightful entries. Then the winner can set the April comp.
Running
499 words
My sister’s boyfriend dumped her so she booked a day at a willow-weaving workshop – in the countryside, calming and therapeutic. She’d make a sculpture of a hare though she’d never seen one in real life. Ironic, I thought, as she’d never seen herself either.
I admit the dumping had been nasty. Sis waiting to meet the boyf in a pub, trying not to check her phone while people round the bar studied her with quick, and slower, glances. A young woman alone must be waiting for someone, or maybe she’d some other reason for being there that was worth pondering as an accompaniment to a slow pint. Sis’s phone pinged, she read the screen and everyone watched her eyes closing and when she opened them to collect up her bag and jacket, her lower eyelids, which had dammed tears, couldn’t help let them spill as she rose and walked, almost ran, out of the pub.
In the end she told me she couldn’t do the workshop because of some team event at her office and it was too late to get her money back and so she offered the place to me. I thought the workshop sounded woo-woo and full of people doing pseudo therapy. But losing the money, neither of us going, felt like a win for the boyf, Sis forfeiting something because of that idiot and her not seeing what he was really like. Blindness all round. Anyway, no point me wondering if the work excuse was her invention, off I went to deepest Devon, steeply banked lanes and primroses just like the blurb had promised before it added, ‘Bring your mind closer to nature’.
I’d seen a hare once. Thought it was a rabbit.
The workshop was in a barn next to a farmhouse. Coffee, tea and juice on a side table were available all day, and a lunch of bean stew and dumplings and homemade cheesecake was brought over from the house. Everyone seemed normal, not taking the nature side of things too seriously, laughing at their sculptures, willow ends stuck out like a hedgehog or shapes sitting dumpily like overweight dogs. A screen showed a video of a real hare running along a field boundary, haunches strong like a kangaroo’s, the hare stopping for a look round, eyes at the sides of its skull, sited proud of their sockets, seeming able to encompass the full circle of a horizon. Long, perked ears, listening for extraterrestrial activity or just for threats such as wandering humans.
The more I made my sculpture look like a hare, the more I felt like a usurper, trying to absorb the animal’s senses. I went outside for air, walked down the lane. The bank dipped, the hedge on top was half in leaf and through it I saw endless green fields. With strong legs I climbed the bank easily, nipped through a gap in the hedge, leaped away and ran, lured by a portent of disclosure, my real self revealed.
The February comp has drawn a delightful selection of stories.
@jillsted Jill, you do an evocative encapsulation of Isabel’s memories of different kinds of love. Her memories are compelling, a sense of her moving through a full life. The ending has a twist, if I’ve read it correctly, that adds a shiver to the story, a question of whether Lydia’s actions are for love or not. Love’s layers are complex and here’s an intriguing possibility to end on, something for readers to chew over.
@sandradavies Sandra, this multi-stranded story is also intriguing. You show well the surprise that can come from discovering who people have chosen to marry, and how observers and friends do a review of what they’ve known so far. I liked the atmosphere of a windy wedding day. The story is some way over the word limit so I can’t in conscience treat it equally with the other entries, but I do thank you for posting it. The taking part is as important as the winning, as is providing us all with an interesting story to read. This is an especially busy time of year with the Challenge happening too, so thank you for this entry.
@athelstone Ath, a Teabreak story is always a pleasure. This one has touching indications of his childhood, his character and the delight of maybe first love or something early anyway. Brina’s comment at the end is suggestive of all sorts of scenarios to come, possibly of young heartbreak or at least of growing up. You’ve captured a lot in a short time. A satisfying story.Ath, over to you for March.
Amid the excitement of the annual Den Challenge there’s also the February monthly comp!! A reminder that there are two days left to enter. Max of 400 words on the theme of love.
A reminder of the monthly comp, as we’re over half way through February already.
Here’s the original post:
As it’s February the theme this month is love. It needn’t be romantic. It can be of any sort – for a place, a piece of music, an animal – whatever you like that that provokes a feeling of love.
Max 400 words, deadline midnight Saturday 28th February.
Thank you, Terrie. That’s a lovely surprise! Thank you, Jill and Sandra too. The thrill of a new baby from Jill, with other newnesses too. And Sandra – creative writing books are such a mixed bag. I’m glad you have one which is properly helpful.
I’ll post the February comp later.
500 words
Jim’s ballet exercises weren’t about dancing, they were about muscle fitness, until he was bent over, clutching the Aga rail which was his barre, and the shooting pains in his back were a quiversful of landed arrows. Gasping for breath he thought of that painting of St Sebastian, a dreary affair in his view, inspirational of nothing. But, ha! Sceptics’ revenge, his only view now was downwards to old baggy trousers, feet in thick wellie socks, and a circle of floor. Jessie his dog walked over to add to the small selection of sights.
‘No fool like an old fool, Jess,’ he said to her cocked head and keen blue eyes.
It had started as a new-year resolution to unstiffen his body, the YouTube videos of a ballerina, basic steps she’d said, and him ready to believe, never mind her looking about eighteen with the suppleness to match. Bodies were the same underneath and him being heavy and solid was proof of strength. The years spent wrestling with stubborn sheep, which activity needed many pushes and pulls, which were surely good. Lifting of hay and straw bales: muscle building. Walks over hilly fields: cardiovascular health. But for a while everything had been slower and the getting on and off the quad bike stiffer, especially in the winter cold. Meanwhile, Jess jumped into the back of the bike and leapt out again when sheep needed gathering. Low to the ground she went, stealthy, slinking, beauty in motion.
At the Aga he pushed the tea-towels and oven mitts aside, curled calloused hands into a good grip and summoned the old work-ethic, but for different reasons. The tasks: get to the kitchen table to sit down, but first stand up straight.
Another load of arrows. Or electrical shocks. Down he went, bent over again, forced to it, showing Jess a cruel mimicry of the movement copied from the ballerina. It had started well. He’d stood in first position, heels together, feet Charlie Chaplin, one hand on the rail. Bend forward first with a with a straight back, said the girl, weight going through your toes. Now curve your back downwards. Her free arm had swept widely and elegantly to the floor, like a bloke bowing at some old-fashioned dance.
Doubled over, Jim shuffled to the table while the dancer still sent out instructions. His wife found him a while later, the video thankfully finished. She listened to the tale.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s look at the NHS website.’
What heaviness of mortality was held in those words.
During the next few days he recovered while his wife and neighbours looked after the sheep, and he promised not to try ballet again. From the house he looked across the farmyard, where the cat was sunning himself on the wall in the first hint of warmth January had given. The cat stretched its back, tail up. Jess often did that too. You could learn things from animals. Jim imagined himself on all fours, spine stretched.
Thank you, Terrie! And congratulations on a truly creepy story, Ath. And Jill for a heart-warming, magical tale – exactly right for the time of year.
You asked for a heart-warming tale, Terrie, but my story, after I started it and got stuck, became the opposite. You’re welcome to disqualify it or not read it at all.
Content warning: includes postnatal depression
499 words including title
I Lied When I Said My Daughter Lived Abroad
After that walk up and down a steep crag, I sat beside the fire and stretched my legs. The hotel’s luxurious warmth soothed my aching calves. A glass of mulled wine, passed to me by another woman in our party, diluted some of the lingering discomfort of my mind.
Darkness fell outside and someone said, ‘It’s time for a story or two.’
Others in our little group laughed but no storyteller came forth. I kept a straight face – a mistake.
‘There’s something in your mind,’ one of the men said. ‘Go on, tell us.’
There seemed no harm in saying that I’d been thinking of my daughter, whose favourite places included a Scottish crag or several. I told them how we used to walk together.
‘Used to?’ I was asked. ‘And now?’
That’s when I lied, adding, ‘We don’t see each other often. I’ve no fireside tales, I’m afraid.’
The conversation moved elsewhere.
During our group’s walk a north-westerly wind had bitten at my lungs. During our descent from the crag, small boggy pools at its base had shone black and glassy like mementoes of cold, deep loch water.
In the hotel I must have appeared wrapped in reminiscence, because no one interrupted while I gazed into the fire. My daughter and her husband had lived in a pretty cottage beside a Scottish loch, where sunshine often lit the south-facing house. But on my visits I’d found the surroundings gloomy. Beside the loch, a narrow pebbled beach plunged into the water. I thought how little light there’d be under the surface, even a few metres from the shore. The loch’s depth had been measured but what that ravine might look like was outwith my imagination.
My daughter became pregnant and had a little boy. Oh, what a joyous day six months ago when I drove to the hospital to see my grandson. In hindsight, my daughter was too quiet, too distant from the start. Talking therapies didn’t help her bond with her son. Anti-depressants didn’t lift her. She stopped speaking. A planned admittance to a hospital met administrative delay.
I never envisaged her pouring petrol inside the cottage while her husband and son were out for a walk. That stone cottage had timbers dry enough to stoke any blaze. My daughter, despite mitigating circumstances, was convicted of wilful fire raising and destruction of property, and sent to a secure mental health hospital. She’s still there.
‘I did it to get help,’ she told me on one of my rare visits, for she didn’t want to see me often. ‘I thought the loch was my friend. Its darkness – that’s how I felt. But you’d never liked it and I couldn’t explain.’
I should have realised more, understood better.
Beside the hotel fire, someone started a ghost story and the party waited for pleasurable shivers. I watched the flames licking the logs, their leaps behind and around one another. I was already haunted.
What fabulous entries, all of them fantastical, brilliant and captivating. Halloween has prompted very good stories.
@jillsted – here was an enticing mystery with a comic touch. Told with great pacing and a strong atmosphere of folk tale, it hooked me from start to finish.
@purplewitch (Terrie) – what wonderful creepiness. I loved the rich language and imagery, as well as the story itself. A real sense of other-worldliness and a different set of rules.
@janette – an excellent tale of revenge, a picture so well woven in of an abusive marriage and the hint of mother-in-law as an malignant influence. I loved the narrator’s voice too.
@sandradavies – what fun there is in this story of manipulative game playing, a wronged wife taking advantage of the mischief available on Halloween.
@athelstone – a haunted house inhabited by an unquiet, vengeful ghost. A delightfully tingly and enjoyable take on a classic form. An innocent person about their business and then oof!For sheer creepiness and shiveriness levels within such evocative language, I’ve picked Terrie’s story as the winner. Over to you, @purplewitch