Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Writtin' Thread
jodizzle:
Challenge: Tea, Skipping, Juggle
She was a gypsy girl, with wild red hair and bells on her fingers. I climbed out my window and followed when she beckoned, tiny waif girl darting through the forest. She disappeared into the shadows and I followed the sound of her tiny tinkling bells until I found her skipping stones on a pond.
“My name is Starlight” she told me, but I knew her name was Paige. She led me into a world of dreams, I took off my shoes before I entered. We drank tea from cups so tiny it was gone in a mouthful, and shared cakes barely big enough for one. “We’re too big to be here” I told her, but she just smiled and took more tea.
She taught me how to juggle using pomegranates and we ate them after, making our mouths sticky and red. She talked to the fishes and told me the secrets they whispered to her. When it got dark she took me back to my world and boosted me up through my window. I’d lost my shoes. “Goodbye Starlight” I whispered to her shadowy figure as she turned away.
“My name is Paige” she said.
Tom:
She said to me, "It's hard to juggle multiple things at once."
"I know but-"
"-all you need is someone to share the burden," she said pouring me another cup of tea. "I've been thinking that-"
"-wait you want to get married?" I'm sitting in her kitchen, we're awash with brilliant shades of light from her stain glass window. The Maddona imposed upon her face.
"Yes, that is exactly what I'm suggesting. The way I see it you need to stay in Australia and we could both benefit financially and Claire adores you." She took another sip from her cup and paused for my response.
"But it'd be a marriage of convenience - we aren't even remotely in love! I'm not ready to be anyone's father let alone Claire's adoptive father!" I'm standing up and shouting, hot tea down my front. In addition, I've just got the attention of an elderly neighbour.
"Don't worry I'll get." She picks up a tea towel, she gets over and sits next to me drying my lap. I sit down again and she leans over and whispers: "Our friendship has been anything but platonic. A marriage of convenievce it is, no messy courting, we can skip it because for all intents and purposes," her hands now within my pants, "we are very much in love Ally."
est:
She sipped and sat and stared intently across the fine bone brim and out into the world beyond her own. Beyond the heavy velvet drapes and beyond the half-closed wooden slat blinds (covered, she noticed, in a thin film of dust) small children ran and played in the streets and the yards among assorted discarded toys. Now yelling and running with small plastic guns, now jumping rope and swinging to and fro on a front-yard swing set, now shuffling along in push-pedal cars, bumping and shouting and pushing about, a jumble of disparate activities glued with rambunction.
With eyes suddenly wide Eleanor put her cup down with a clank, her fingers barely disentangling themselves before the shakes started in earnest. She sank to the carpet unsteadily, first to knees, then hands and knees, then finally laid onto her side and clutched at her knees, forehead pressed against them. Curled tightly thus on the floor she held herself comparatively still, and by focusing on the feel of the plush wool rug on her cheek she tried to will herself not to slip away.
Eleanor knew it was a dream because she was no longer shuddering. She was outside in a yard, sitting on a small stump. The children ran around her, still caught up in their games. She wanted more than anything to join them, the small girl with the tawny hair chasing the laughing dumpy boy with no shoes, but she was so tired. In the yard across the low wooden fence from her an older boy juggled apples for three younger boys all of whom seemed barely able to wait to show off next. She pushed at the stump, attempting to shove off and up but instead found herself falling backward, sky rolling over and over in her eyes then dimming grey with swirling clouds before fading to black.
The grass against her face felt like thick carpet when she woke, sun in her eyes, her head foggy and her mouth wet with sleepspit. She rubbed at her face with still slightly shaking hands and then the grass really was carpet, the sun filtering through the window revealing dust motes as they danced gaily above the woolly pile. She smashed her fist through those motes and screamed, hot fire exploding in her wrist as it struck the floor. As she screamed again in pain rushed footsteps fell in the hall, growing louder until the door swung open, a woman sweeping in and down to hold her close and whisper in her ear. "It's ok sweetie, I'm here, I'm here" the woman said as she rocked Eleanor to and fro in her arms. The woman had kindly features and was soft and warm and smelled of jasmine, but Eleanor knew she was full of lies. Eleanor was sick of the lies.
"I want to die, mommy" Eleanor whispered and the rocking abruptly stopped. "Don't say that sweetie please don't say that, things will get better, I promise"
"They won't mommy, I know it, this is how I am m m m m" Eleanor stuttered, her small frail body again starting to shake.
The woman held Eleanor close. She knew there was nothing she could do for her when she was like this, so instead she simply cried.
ZJGent:
Lin ran through the summersweet tea-fields and danced a butterfly to her father's house. The tannin draped iridescent over the Sylhet plantations made the air hot and thick and wet - and Lin was soon delirious. The cirrus clouds fought wraith wars and dissipated into cowardly absence. Lin's hard and tanned feet thrummed against the hard and cracked mud like the pistons of a steam train. Out in the effervescence of the valley centre, the petulant insects swooned over each other and ate at any moisture left in the topsoil. Up here, at the cup's pocked green lip, only occasional dragonflies disturbed the peace - nibbling at pockets of cool air and pirouetting madly up displaced zephyrs. At the bowl valley's rim, only Lin and dragonflies moved, and with mad haste borne of nothing else to do but enjoy.
Lin, for her part, was skipping so hard and so fast that sweat ran in rivulets down her thin grey tunic, collating her skin and the fabric in clammy wet patches. At the gate to her father's house she finally rested, saying a quick prayer of thanks to her Summer for his copious gifts. Inside, her father juggled the numbers that needed feeding to the business-suited wolves that bayed every month for his money blood. But Lin was too young to hear their ever-angrier call, and too blind to her father's failing health. In asking for dinner, she granted him only a reprieve from his shifting, faceless creditors and his ever-expanding financial nemesis. Still, her father knew real duty when asked for it, and brought down Lin's wooden bowl from the shelf. The duty from father to daughter, from parent to child, bent his shoulders none, and brought this angry summer back a gentle warmth.
---
Hair, Barbarism, Vigour ?
jodizzle:
I especially like the second paragraph Roddy.
Challenge: Hair, Barbarism, Vigour
No more apologies. The pounding in my head only gets worse when I try to think of words to redeem myself to you. I am sickened by the groveling shadow of myself I have become, struggling to make you love me with a vigour that disgusts and distresses me. “Barbarism begins at home” you say. I think it’s the line from a song but you say it like you created it. You say it like you mean it.
The day you cut my hair was the last straw. You screamed at me for taking too long in the bathroom and dragged me into the kitchen by my throat. Using the blunt and filthy kitchen scissors you severed the last remaining tether of my restraint.
I creep into your room while you sleep, stepping around the discarded whiskey bottles that litter the floor. I see the spittle bubbling on your lips and give a grimace of disgust. I press the pillow down firmly on your face and hold it there, unwavering, until you cease to struggle.
“Barbarism begins at home mother” I say.
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