Here we are at Week 182.
Our process was my inspiration this week, well sort of, I did go off on a few tangents so no change there.
When we read all the submissions, it makes us realise what we like, enjoy, what we dislike and what annoys us. And I am not talking about the writing, (…Well!) I’m talking about the subjects and what they make us consider.
Continue reading “Week 182 – Hated Things, Freedom Of Speech And Mixed Emotions”
Then the cloud of confusion left her face. I never felt the same about her afterward. It was as though I was a ghost, she saw and heard me even responded to me, but I seemed nothing more than a passing breeze to her.
You’re alone hurrying by under cloudy night skies.
I’m lost in the shadows on the lips of the fetid alley. I’m feverish, near fainting, fading, fading away. You catch a glimpse of me, spy me, eye me, wonder, imagine me. You race away to lock your doors, check your windows.
In your simple underwear you slip between smooth, clean, cotton sheets and dream me, dream me tall, slender, strong.
Carrie tilts her head on the back of the vinyl seat on Bus 109 and breathes deeply for the first time in two weeks. The collar of her pressed white uniform is smudged with day old makeup and tears. Her shifts at Memorial Hospital are becoming longer and her patience shorter for the everyday cold and flu vaccinations. She lets her head roll until the tip of her nose touches frosted glass. Her eyes flutter open to see a man in his seventies, draped in loose cotton, stare back at her and wave. The man gives a one-toothed grin and turns his back, shielding whatever sits behind his tall frame. She allows her eyelids to become heavy and falls asleep to the soft lull of the bus’s engine as it trucks through Louisville, Kentucky.
I know you grew up on the streets, that you feel the streets made you, that you are now the streets, maybe just a human version. I know that when you were younger, death led your parents along and your relatives rejected you saying you were bad omen, that whenever you passed something gets missing. But you knew you were not a thief, that you could do nothing with your skinny limbs, so you told everyone you met on the streets that your relatives were wicked. But those strangers never understood you because you spoke Igbo in a city dominated by pidgin speaking strangers. The few who understood you called you a liar, ajo nwa, a bad child. You must have been six then.
Continue reading “A Frog’s Home is Called a Pond by Bryan Okwesili”
She hated her job. All day she read and reworked words that didn’t satisfy, words dry, tasteless, and underripe — words like rectifier and microprocessor and power semiconductor. Their heaviness left paste in her mouth.
Continue reading “The Literal Gourmand — A Fable by Daun Daemon”
Here we are at week 181.
There is no way that number 181 is anywhere near as groovy as 180.
Continue reading “Week 181 – Retro Words, Poor Parenting And Curvature Of The Spine.”
“Brisling!” yelled his boss Marquis, “if you don’t get out of the way, I’ll kick your ass for good.” And Marquis, darker but plump himself, wearing an atrocious suit with orange lines in it, smiled that puffy-cheeked grin he’d always use, like it was punctuation itself. I’m the boss and you’re the slob, it said. It was nothing less than a tongue speaking right at Brisling’s ear. Even commas and periods were in place, the exclamation points by the fingers. If there were question marks, he’d know them. He bet he could quote him verbatim, all the ways the boss man moved. All of it was catalogued, scored, filed away in his mind.
She reached the sea.
It was not what Sukarti had expected. The poster at the bus stop made it look like paradise – azure blue water lapping onto sparkling white sand, framed by swaying palm trees – an image so real she could step right into it. The reality facing her was less seductive. The sand was rough and gathered under her feet in damp clumps. The water was a sickly, anaemic shade of green, and while it was indeed lapping onto shore, each wave bore a load of grimy debris – crushed plastic bottles, hollowed-out coconuts, a broken sun-bleached frisbee.
My dog Scrapple was digging up my yard one day. I hightailed to scold him. Come to find out, Scrapple had dugged up this old thing, looks like a paper, a document of some sort. I don’t know what it means. Don’t right know if it means anything, actually. Letters a buncha hooks and ciphers squiggly as a tub of nightcrawlers.
literally stories 