For Uzma, joining her local Creative Writing Circle was the challenge she felt ready for, a therapy of sorts. When she wrote, secrets flowed from her pen, bypassing her brain and heart into prose on the page. They told of the secrets she kept, the secrets she revealed and the secrets she told herself.
It was as if this week’s writing prompt was beckoning her to confront all her secrets at once. Let’s do this, she thought…
Continue readingBud pulled Jack to one side outside the cell. ”They want us to turn up the heat on the boy.”
” You telling me they actually believe that kid has an inside track on ‘THE CHOSEN ONE’? He’s paranoid, mad as a box of hares, everyone knows.”
” Ssh, walls have ears. I know people have disappeared for saying less aloud.”
Jack snorted, ”OK, let’s get on with it, suppose we are the moral police.”
Continue readingSure, I regret working with Harlan Ray.
His studio had posters of naked women on the walls, empty beer cans littering the floor, and the company line was “Harlan Ray is God”. Should have quit when the guys dubbed me a faggot for choosing to go to the ballet rather than a football game. Well, it was winter, and I’d rather be in doors.
Continue readingThe Security Meeting was tense with unspoken fears. Not seen in the unflinching, inscrutable expressions…. but elsewhere. Hidden from view under the table, a drumbeat of feet as frog-like tongue extending then retracting, the forgiving wool carpet closed over the anxiety in a darting visco-elasticity; clenched hands scrunched the thighs of workaday suits; heels strummed in silence along one calf, one shin then changed legs.
The President spoke. “Any suggestions how the people can be brought on board? Compliance with whatever we decide is crucial. The survival of humanity, not to mention our intergalactic standing, is at a crossroads. Could go one way or the other”
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“Tell me how it started, Doctor Frost,” she said, leaning close.
“It was the winter of ’57 when I first opened my new eyes and saw the world as it really is.” I replied. The garlic on her breath irritated but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing my objections. “Of course, I would not have been able to process the wealth of visual inputs I then had, but for the expanded processing capacity I’d installed two years previously.”
“But why go so far?”
I decided I hated her face.
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The novel, set in an indeterminate ‘past’, concerns love across the social divide. The hero is a wealthy (en)titled gentleman in love with a serving girl from a local tavern. The girl’s mother opposes the match. Chapter three, where the plot thickens, was the point at which the novel had been set aside, mainly for lack of a discernible plot.
Unfortunately, the planets were not fully in alignment for Melinda Thistlethwaite’ s most recent flirtation with the arts. She was confident, however, that she would eventually achieve success, once her talents had coupled with artistic destiny.
Continue readingHow to survive a (man-made) natural disaster, by Sophia, aged 9
The climate change scientists warned that the wave was coming. But that was before the government silenced them.
Our parents were all too busy arguing about Brexit to help.
“Dad?” I said, “Can we move to the Midlands?”
“Is this about that tsunami nonsense again?” he laughed, stuffing yet another loaf of emergency No-Deal-Brexit bread into the freezer. “It’s scientifically impossible, Sophia.”
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