The Cabin

This is my favourite place.  It is my home.  I bought it and I helped make it.  Many people think that this is a poor substitute for a real house or flat.  they come and admire it and comment on how quaint it is but, they go home and ask their husbands or wives how anyone could live in such a tiny place. They don't realise how lucky i feel to be here.  it may be cold in winter; I have to put on jumpers in the evening and a few winters back I even went to bed in a hat for a few freezing nights.  In the summer it can get boiling hot and stifling until you throw open the door and the double windows and the fresh breeze wanders through the house.

Yes, it might seem like a doll's house to many but I don't mind.  It fits me and there is no space wasted.  There is no guest room and I have to climb up a ladder to get to my own bed at night but this to me is joy, not deprivation.  I walk out on warm evenings feeling the grass underfoot and watch the midges dancing in the air.  I rest my back against the front door and feel the caress of the sun on my face.  

I watch the apple tree turn from bare, to blossom, to fruit and then watch as it weeps it's brown leaves to the ground.  I watch the blackbirds feasting on the fallers; pitted with disease and harbouring some maggots but such richness is still encased in those rosy orbs.

When I am at home, I feel that I can do or be anything I want and although the house is animate I can almost hear it's breath synchronised to mine.


Time up.
Inspiration:  I'm really rushed tonight I have loads of work to do so I wrote about a special place to me and this is the easiest one I've done.

Dormant

The North wind blew.  It blew so hard that the dew froze on the leaves of the trees making them like lace.  It froze the water on the stream at the edges leaving only a turgid and slothful movement in the centre.  It quieted the tiny song birds in the trees who were now intent only on finding enough food to see them through the day and night to come.  It whipped across the faces of people desperate enough to venture outside like razor blades until they scurried back into the warmth of their homes, shriven. It threw crows like missiles through the grey, bleakness of the sky.  It was a day to be dormant.



Time up.
Inspiration: none tonight.  I just needed to write and that's what came out. Clearly not as much as usual. 

Chekhov's Gun

Ellis wasn't an unattractive kid, he was just awkward and quiet.  Like so many teenagers, he spent too much time thinking, his black thoughts turning inwards, constantly tormenting himself over trivial inadequacies.  As a consequence, he was sullen and avoided the other students at school as much as possible.  All apart from one.  She was a golden girl, popular and beautiful but gentle and 

open, completely the opposite of himself: Jessica.  It was as if she existed for him in a permanent halo.  When she walked past, along the buzzing corridor, his gaze, although covert, devoured every single fragment of her.  He had been watching her like this for years and he was exhausted by the hollowness of his adoration.  He needed recognition.  He felt compelled to make some sort of connexion, he didn't care how small, he just wanted her to notice him, to witness in his eyes the awe in which he held her.  Ultimately, he wanted her to love him like he did her. 

He hadn't planned it exactly but he took his chance.  As she walked past on her pilgrimage to class, he allowed his books to tumble from his hand.  They slid like a wave breaking at her feet.  She looked at him and down at the floor, looked back, cocked her eyebrow at him, without the the hint of the gentle smile she used so readily for others, nearly everyone, he thought, and walked on. 

Time up.

Inspiration:  from The Write Practice, they suggest: Practice foreshadowing by writing a scene, early in the first act of a story, and slip in Chekhov’s gun. Don’t fire it yet.  Just make it present somehow.

Beautiful People

Vincent Peters Photography

"Oh, God, yeah, completely.  I know exactly what you mean."

"He really gets it, you know?  He really capture what's going on in the mind.  You know?"

"Oh, yeah, totally.  He really gets that." Christina had completely forgotten who or what they were talking about.  It didn't matter though, she'd worked with Javier on a couple of shoots now and he was always the same: completely focused on himself and the jobs he'd been on, who he'd worked with and for, and how he really wanted to break into acting.  Reflecting on the echoes of his last sentence she concluded that he must have been speaking about a photographer but she couldn't remember which one.

She was so unbelievably bored.  She was hungry too and the stench of the cigarettes they'd been using as props had started to turn her stomach.  It felt like the tar was permeating her every pore.  Her neck was sore from the ridiculously hackneyed position she'd been asked to hold, a rip-off of the 1950s Hollywood publicity shots - done a million times before - and she was freezing cold.  What was worse, Javier, the self-centred idiot, didn't seem to notice or mind the inconveniences of the shoot, he just kept on taking regardless.  She really just wanted to yell at him to shut up but satisfied herself with the mental image of stubbing the lit end of her cigarette out in his eye.



Time up.
Inspiration:  The photo.  I wanted to image an interaction from a given image and imagine what was going on beneath the gloss.

The Desperate Man

                        
'Tempt not a desperate man'

With a mind quivering like the tender leaves of the birch in a spring gale, he writhes there in his agony.  She cannot be his.  She will not be his.  He will never possess her.  His dreams and fantasies, tender and dramatic, domestic and passionate, that have supported his body and soul for so long, have been ripped away.  A huge cavern has appeared at his feet and now his mind turns to the temptation of flinging himself into the abyss.  His expressions of longing, of the justice of his claim over her, of the deep connexion that he could never break, now or ever, are as useless to her as the empty leaves of the memoir next to the corpse.

He cannot conceive the future, he flings his mind to the past, reliving the promises made and given, the two souls entwining to become one.  His incredulity that is was possible for one soul to break free from the commixture of the two.  How could it be possible that her vision of their future could possibly differ from his?

Who would he spend eternity with now?




Time Up.
Inspiration:  I saw this picture and the title reminded me of Romeo.  Naturally, it made me wonder why a man might become desperate and, like Romeo, my mind lead its way to love.

Change

There is a change coming, I can feel it.  It is the lightness off the air, the glow that lingers a fraction longer in the darkening sky.  Perhaps it started with the song of the robin in the hedge.  Perhaps it started when I felt suddenly overburdened with the layers of clothing I wore for the ritual Sunday walk.  I feel sure, though, that it was some internal kind of clock.  The same one that tells us when it is time to wake or sleep; the same that tells us that something is not quite as it should be and we need to be on our guard; the same that tells us that we have found someone that will make our life more comfortable than it has every been before.

Change is not always for the good, but more often than not it is.  In any case, we can't stop it, not this change, being in the hands of Nature and this change is always for the better, long anticipated and wished for, longed for, in fact, and when it starts to arrive it is like a deep sigh, a knowingness that everything will be alright. 



Time up.
Inspiration: was a bit lacking tonight.  I just wrote about how I felt about the change of the season.

Clock watching

Do you ever have that feeling that the clock beating inside you is permanently telling you that you're late for something? Well, that's me. Right now.

My skin is alive to every sensation but heightened to a ridiculous degree. Sounds, especially are abhorrent; loud sounds unbearable.  If there was a door that opened into my body you wouldn't find pulsing red organs, oh no.  There would be a sheen of metal and the black ooze of the oil needed to drive cogs, which would be grinding away relentlessly like some Victorian treadmill.

If my mind were personified it would resemble some snarling beast backed into a corner, froth hanging in ribbons from its yellow fangs, one front paw poised in front of it's body as defence or leaverage for it's next pounce.  The one thing that can barely be seen in the eyes of the creature there, muscles taught like spun steel, is not the rage but the fear.


Time up.
Inspiration: the anger at obliging myself to write every day.  I'm stressed and angry. I don't want to write this but I want to keep my promise to myself.