As you may know, I sometimes play a bit of Flash Fiction over on Anna Spargo Ryan’s blog.  Here’s my latest, in response to the prompt:

The rain spattering on the half-moon of the canvas beat out a groove that was like a blogger starting a new post- beginning slowly, then increasing in speed and intensity as she found her rhythm, then being joined by eight then thirty-two then hundreds of bloggers, all trying to get their posts published first.

He listened to the warm puffs of the children’s breathing among the breaks in typing, as the rain ebbed and then grew and then ebbed.  They always loved listening to their children make their tiny snuffles.

He composed the sentence in his head first before trying it out in the air.  It sounded good, so he let it mix with oxygen.  Turning on his side he said, “What was rain for, if not a kiss under its dark canopy?”

He knew she would laugh and say, “Wanker” as she always did with his poetry.  And then they would kiss and kiss with mouths turning up at the corners as they laughed at him a little, but mostly just laughed together.  He always knew how to make her laugh.  And she always knew how to laugh.

He reached over to touch the warm edge of her smiling mouth with his thumb, to feel her smile as well as hear it, as he said again, “What was rain for, if not a kiss under its dark canopy?”

His hand fell into dense darkness and cold.

She was not there to call him a wanker.  The rain was for his heart.

There’s a competition running by the Australian Writer’s Centre called Best Australian Blogs, and I have a nomination…

So if you like what you read over here, then I’d love you to send a vote my way…

Just click on HERE and have a go…

You’ll see I’m right on top of the list, due to an inadvertent (but inspired) inappropriate use of punctuation, so it’s not even that much of a hassle.

Go on, it’s much less painful than voting for Tony Abbott, which apparently someone did..

Thanks heaps for voting (if you are, indeed voting for me), and even if you aren’t, you know I’m still glad you take the time to have a read of my stuff every now and then…

…From The Ashers xx

Some of you may know I play a little thing over on Anna Spargo Ryan’s Blog called Flash Fiction.  The prompt this week was: “They ate grapes together under the fog of afternoon.”

Here it is:

Of all the types of fog, afternoon fog was the worst.

Morning fog was kind of expected, and was somehow deliciously painful.  Morning fog could bring with it a pain like a knitting needle to the temple, or a dull burning of the intestines.  It married with a mouth that felt full of breadcrumbs, and a tongue one and a half times it’s normal size.  But morning fog had a smell of repentance to it, and with that, re-birth.

Evening fog was to be coveted.  It was light and fizzy and full of promise.  Evening fog was the gauzy beginnings of a fun night ahead.  The slight blurring of reality that came with the fog was welcome, as it buffed his sharp edges, made him more interesting and outgoing and helped him fit.

Afternoon fog was the worst.  It held hands with an overwhelming fatigue that made his steps heavy and slow.  It smelt of shame and denial and furtiveness.  He knew his eyes would be shifty, and she would try not to notice, but she would, and they would scream at each other.  And that would only make the fog clot.

She had set up a makeshift picnic on the balcony to welcome him home.  A sense of celebration, now that he was no longer drinking.  She had laid out the bright yellow tablecloth of hope and prayer, with a platter of strawberries and grapes and water crackers and brie.  He sat down next to her and she smiled at him, her face a moon of optimism, and he knew he couldn’t tell her. Not today.

So he fought the fog, and tried to feel as sober as the atomic strength mints he always had pushed hard into his cheek.  She moved the platter forward toward him and  just looking at the over-ripe strawberries, on their way to liquid, and the dried edges of the brie, made the hot bile sear the back of his throat.  She must have been sitting her a while.

He swallowed hard, and tried to relax his jaw muscles, reaching for a grape, fighting away the fog of two vodkas at lunch that had become seven.  She smiled again, wider this time.  She really did want to believe him, believe in him, even when she knew she was holding onto the balloon of a lie that would either deflate or burst, depending on how she nurtured it.

He forced is own marriage-dependent smile, and they ate grapes together under the fog of afternoon.

As you know Flash Fiction is a fun thing we do over on Anna Spargo-Ryan’s Blog.. Today the writing prompt was a soundbite (and I have no idea how to copy it over to here for you) but to me, it sounded like someone walking through crispy Autumn leaves.. Anyway, here you go:

They walked down the wide street, hand in hand.  He was holding a little tighter, but that was alright, she was used to that.  He didn’t want her flitting off anywhere.  He could tell her heart wasn’t one that could be subdued by responsibility or convention.

The anaemic Melbourne light tried to scare away the chill that always came with April, but it was too depressed to make much imprint.  Her heart had more weight than it should have for this time of year.  Usually she had until at least June until it became too heavy to hold up, but this year it had come early.

To send the feeling scurrying, she ran to the gutter where the Autumn leaves were thick and crisp, and started kicking them up.  They flew into the air like Monarch butterflies on their first flight.  Orange-yellow wings flapping, trying to lift the heaviness.  Some of the wings caught the light.  Some were just covered in gutter-sludge.  She giggled.  She felt some extra room in her chest.

“Don’t do that”, he said.

She looked at him, eyes a question-mark.

“You’ll get that gloop everywhere.”

She looked at him, eyes a question-mark.

“And you don’t know what’s underneath all those leaves, there could be a rock or something.  You could hurt your toe.”

She looked at him, her eyes a sagging question-mark.

They walked on.  Her in the leaves, him on the road.  They didn’t hold hands.  She sighed with her mind.  It was time for an Autumn leaving.

This is in response to a writing prompt by Anna Spargo-Ryan.. A little game she has going on called Flash Fiction. The prompt was: “What about the others?” he said.  “What others?”

When Rob left me I’d like to say my heart broke, but my heart stayed strangely intact.  Which made everything so much worse because it meant that I felt every last bit of vicious shit he threw my way.  I felt it when he said I was a bitch.  I felt it when he said it was my fault he was leaving. I felt it when he said that if I hadn’t been so frigid he never would have had to “get a root from the horny bird up the road at number 28”.

Frigid?  Horny?  Where were we, 1982?  It’s a wonder he didn’t send me a fax outlining all of my faults.  Which in the scheme of things would have been better, kinder, because every word from his honed tongue hurt like a stab and caused me to spear off into separate parts.  I wondered if the fragments of me would ever meld back together.

The days and weeks and months mooshed together.

I went through the motions.  To work and back, shops and back, work and back, gym and back, work and back, work and back, drinks and back, work and back.  Then the fissure of the weekend to sit within until Monday came and I could climb back out into the world, hoping that the weight of the air out there wouldn’t press me to the ground.

The girls from work were kind and sweet in the beginning, but after three months they were sick of the sight of my slightly greasy hair and my unironed shirts.  They wanted me back.  Back to how I was before.  They wanted me to laugh with my eyes and down to my toes.  I laughed with my teeth.  They wanted me to be enthusiastic so that my skin tingled, but I couldn’t even feel the sweet scores I made in my skin every night.

They insisted I go out with James.

It’ll be fun, they said.

You might even get laid, they giggled.

He’s lovely, he’ll be kind, they said, eyes big and earnest.

So I went.  Not because of a glint of desire, but because they were kind and I wanted them to believe I was trying.  Even though I couldn’t give a fuck.

Weirdly, James was really nice.  Or, not weird that he was nice, but weird that I noticed.  It was the first thing I’d noticed in another person since I noticed that Rob smelt like another woman, and I’m not talking about a smell you buy at Myer.  So noticing things about other people wasn’t my plan these days.

James and I went out for coffee and then to lunch, and finally out to dinner.  We hit it off, and after the dinner at Miss Moneypenny’s we had it off in the silence of his Camry in the National Park carpark.  I couldn’t really get into it, between keeping my sleeves down to cover the scrapes and thinking the ghost of Harold the Koala was watching my white bum jiggle through the windscreen.

I kept my sleeves down and my thoughts encased, and James and I saw each other every other day.  I didn’t allow any cracks in the carapace of my mind,  I skated along, just this side of a diagnosis, with James oblivious to the sensuous ruptures I performed every night after he left.

We sat on the picnic blanket-the one I got from KFC after Rob left, and I ate a whole FatFuck sized bucket of original recipe until I vomited- and talked about what we would do for the holidays.  I wanted to go on a cruise, and James wanted to go camping at Imbil.  I hated camping and Imbil sounded crap, so I pushed for the cruise a bit more than I usually would.  James started to get the shits, and it was pissing me off, because he wouldn’t give me a reason for not cruising.

Why not though? I said, again.

Look, I just don’t want to okay, he said.

It’ll be fun, and besides, everything is included, so it’s a bargain, I said.

I told you, I bloody don’t want to, can’t you just drop it? he said.

No, I won’t, not until you give me one good reason why not, I said.

What about the others? he said.

What others? I said.

He made a gesture, like Delvene Delaney on Sale of the Century, pointing out the rich prizes, sitting on the KFC blanket with us.

What others? I said, a little more urgently.

James just smiled.

So I guess I’ve always secretly wanted to be a writer.

A proper writer.

And just so you know, a proper writer is someone who can hold your heart, or your breathing thingies, or your funny bones or your gooey, grey brain in their hand and squeeze just the right amount at just the right time to make the emotion pop right out.

And they write books.

With loads of sentences that string together in long lines.  Until the end.

I’ve always been writing, scribbling and jotting, but only for me, and maybe for a couple of other people.  But only if I pretty much know they already kind of like me, and might also like the words that I line up.  So I stated this blog, thinking that maybe one day someone would read this, and maybe someone else would tell me they’ve read it, and maybe some other person would say they liked how some of the words sounded propped up together.

So that happened.

And something even more than those magical three things happened right after that: someone told me they liked some of the parts of the blog so much that they thought some of the pieces and bits that I go on (and on) about could be a book.  And they would like to make that book.

Imagine that?

Well I have and I did and now a bit of an annoying thing has happened.  I’ve run out of words. Lost the plot.

I hope the plot comes back tomorrow.

RIP Plot.

Ever lost the plot when you got what you wanted?