Tag: amwriting

Thresholds – Creative Non-fiction

Nighttime city skyline with train tracks, roads, and glowing traffic lines

These places are the copper traces on the circuit board, the getting-there only. They are the distance not noted down in diaries, cut out of video footage. They are the liminal – forgettable and mundane, marked only by footsteps and a sense of getting somewhere else.

The bus stations with their homeless spikes. The railway platforms – cold and agoraphobic. The graceful slide up the escalator in the thudding shopping mall. The line outside the nightclub, breath pluming into the clear night sky. These are the loca oblita buried under the bright stimuli awaiting us or behind us in the illuminated past.

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Most Satisfying | Short Story

Formal dining table set before a fireplace in an ornate historic room

Every good story has a satisfying end.

And this had started out looking as though it would be a very good story.

A chimney sweep?

Stuck up a flue?

Only hours before a dinner party for which the hoi polloi of London society would be arriving?

The situation appeared as though it would provide anecdote material that my neighbours and rivals could only dream of and I, Mrs Honoria St. Clair, fully intended for the boy – Michael? Martin? – to serve as the amuse bouche of the gossip feast set before my guests.

Such imaginings had been based on the premise, of course, that Michael? Martin? (let us call him Michtin for ease) would eventually manage to extricate himself from what is, after all, one of the more generous chimneys in west London. Michtin was, however, lodged rather firmly, prompting me to politely ask him, after an hour of unpleasant grunting and panting issuing from mid-wall, whether he was really of an age to be chimney sweeping any longer.

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Freezer Discipline | Short Story

Frost-covered freezer drawer filled with frozen vegetables, peas, ice cream, and packaged food

A job worth doing is a job worth doing properly. But what if it’s no longer worth doing at all? What if this is an appliance better on the kerb and waiting for the council to uplift?

This was an easy task six months ago, but with every freezer tray left slightly ajar, the frost has crept in, in the cold, in the dark, some fluffy experiment escaped from the lab/from the space between those spilled peas and that last, lonely fish finger that no-one’s ever going to eat.

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Requiem for the Real | Creative Non-Fiction

Crowd of people holding up smartphones recording a live performance

Silicon and gallium lenses, held up in supplication – a requiem for the real, a feast for the shortsighted. Lost is the sense of wonder, of bare-eyed goggle, replaced instead with a brutal cataloguing of experience, a repackaging of the physical for the swipers, the sofa-saddled.

Would those crafters, those master masons, those flit-fingered painters have sweated and pored by lights – candle, rush, oil – if they knew their creations would be framed by sweaty-fingered glass? Would they have risen from their beds if they knew their fate was to be repackaged and talked over, buried under the suffocating, expanding blanket of ‘content’?

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Twelve Cans Beans | Short Story

Shelves with canned goods labeled beans, soup, canned meat, peas, and sacks labeled grains, wheat, rice, oats in a basement pantry

Twelve cans beans.

Ditto lentils.

Twenty bags assorted grains.

Enough powdered milk to choke a donkey.

And then the jumble sale – the canned vegetables, the fruits, the canned meats. She sometimes thinks that it is the world’s worst tombola. They are brought forwards, these tin, flush against the edge of the steel shelves. Everything in its place.

There is a comforting airlessness down here. A silence. Everything is in its place. Everything counted, stacked against some half-imagined Event which would send them down here.

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The Strain of Writing

The strain was beginning to tell on Marcie. She had gone through dry spells before; every author did. This was different, though. It had been nine weeks and four days since the flashing cursor on her laptop screen had edged eastwards.

Marcie had tried every time-honoured, hippie-blessed, sing-in-a-circle-kum-bye-ah cure that internet search engines could be sent to fetch. Nothing had worked. Continue reading “The Strain of Writing” →