Here we are at Week 187.
I was wondering about writers block. Strangely enough when I thought on this I felt so many memories flooding back. Really strong, vivid memories.
I don’t know why as I’ve never suffered from writers block.
It’ll come to me.
Continue reading “Week 186 – Writer’s Block, Questions And Ohhhhh Noooooo!!!!”
Verse 1 – days of innocence.
Those days are still fresh, they’re all that remain of that time, like bombshells after an explosion, or the remains of a decomposed dead animal. Those days when we chased grasshoppers in the small bush in our backyard. There were basically three types: one had intricate patterns on its body: yellow and black stripes, dotted with white; another had the skin of lush grasses, and it was why we found it on rare occasions. The last appeared only during the dry seasons. It had the body of scorched grasses, dusty brown. We would watch them jump from blade grass to blade grass, leaning the thin grasses. And we would crouch whenever we came close enough to any – I would put my finger across my lips to tell you to be quiet, like they could hear our voices and flee – and cup our palms closed on them. We didn’t want them to die. We would tie ropes around their legs and watch them jump, making creepy sounds, as far as the rope could get them.
Continue reading “Garuka – Please Come Back by Ernest O. Ogunyemi”
The note reads:
‘Dear Garbage man, Please make sure you get ALL the trash out of the can.
Thanks! The Brewsters’
I stand there just holding the damp piece of paper. The A-L-L scrawled in all capital letters and underlined. The exclamation mark after the ‘Thanks.’ I look over at the white house nestled among the pruned Spanish oaks and ball the note up. The bathwater rain makes rivulets of space between the white maggots humping up my arms as I hoist the cans in the back of the truck. They feel muscular and clean inching their way under the cuffs of my gloves. My back burns, and the smell of cat urine puffs out of a half-tied bag as it smacks the bottom of the compactor. I grind my teeth and think about how Mrs. Brewster’s wrists must be so silky and warm. About how her perfume would just touch the air around my nostrils as I bit into her heavy breast. A drop of my sweat would fall in the deep divot between her collar bones and how she would moan about how strong I am. How powerful my arms are. I pound the side of the truck and give my driver the thumbs up. Next house.
Jake steps into the hall and comes across a staircase that he had never noticed before. The staircase leads to a suite of lavishly furnished rooms. This old house is grander than he had known.
He often told his wife about his twenty-first birthday. He and his father had sat under a bright red canopy on a dark, starless night. They were at some nameless Chinese restaurant in one of the metropolitan corners of Atlanta, just a few blocks south of Terminal Parkway, where commercial airplanes stitched long blinking lines across the sky. A half block away, he remembered, a street cleaner inched across the asphalt, brushes spinning in a lopsided, broken rhythm.
His wife Millicent had cheated on him and she would pay, but to Everett Harley it was much deeper than being unfaithful; she had constantly touched, with ridicule, what she thought was the most fragile element of his being, poetry; so, he made up his mind that he’d not allow her any pardon for her perils; no rhythm in leniency, no white space in the matter, no alliteration at all, at all.
Continue reading “Hence the Half-way House and the Poet by Tom Sheehan”
Daniel sat clutching a coffee, staring into the blur of humanity. He wasn’t far from his parents’ home and had no need of a rest, he was here to put off the meeting.
He had read somewhere that the guns of HMS Belfast were trained on Watford Gap. He had no idea why, perhaps it symbolised those attempting to escape the capital. Still, he was not attempting an escape, he was heading towards his conflict, though that conflict was an escape of sorts.
Continue reading “The Naming of the Beasts by Matthew Roy Davey”
10:30, Sunday morning, 21 February 1970
-1-
It was one of those little lost lamb spring days that sometimes wander into the dead of a Pacific Northwest winter. The sky was as clear as the devil’s conscience, and the temperature would reach well into the sixties by mid-afternoon. By and by, almost everyone in Charleston would go out to grab a piece of that little lost lamb spring day; for everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until another dreary storm blew in off Philo Bay.
Continue reading “A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison”
What is the most important quality that your Soulmate should possess?
It was not the first question, or the last. It was somewhere in the middle. I could look it up but you took my electronics. It’s only memory I can look to now, and we all know what a liar that motherfucker is.
Honesty.
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.
