Day 203: Clip Show Special #2

Yesterday I compiled a list of my favourite comedy posts that have come out of this daily blogging challenge I've been undertaking. Here is a compilation of everything else:

Serious Stuff

Mental health, especially my own struggles with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and recurring negative thoughts, has been a huge subject in my writing. About one in twenty days I seem to be trying something silly or fun or creative, and the other nineteen I'm worrying sincerely that I'm a worthless failure and everything in life is irreparably broken. There's strength to be taken from writing about all this though, in helping me get through it, and hopefully helping others who may feel similar things. Here are some of my faves:

Day 12 - an early post about blogging as Zen painting.

Day 13 - being hit by waves of self-loathing, thinking back on an adolescence growing up suffering from acne. Painful, but helpful.

Day 25 - another early one, about dealing with my gammy eyes and what it actually feels like to be depressed. I used to be incredibly self-conscious when writing about my own depression. Guess I got over that.

Day 30 - to celebrate reaching my original goal of a month of sober blogging I wrote the most intimately I have yet done about having acne. It felt gross to write, and still feels gross now, but, hey, you gotta write that real stuff, or what's the point?

Commitment - a nice post about writing-as-relationship, about accepting the hard times.

Passion - a day finding beauty, or at least the briefest reflected glimmer of beauty, in the mundane, the quotidian.

Still - yet another attack of depression, but forcing myself to write through it, to get something down. To have come here on the hardest, worst, most futile days, and still to have hammered words out, is perhaps the achievement of which I’m most proud.

Friends with bicycles - a post about being socially anxious in a coffee shop, as is my wont.

Things I like - a nice dose of positivity. The bit about vision is cool, it’s something I think about a lot. Vision is weird.

Unwrapped - about going to the zero-waste food shop round the corner from my house. I still go. You should go. Just go!

Echoes - from when I did some manual labour with my friend and learnt all about being a man. Half silly, half sincere, as usual.

Storm - another post about feeling depression, I remember the effort it took to not rise to the negative thoughts, to accept them, watch them, write them out honestly, and let them go. At the time it felt like turning a corner, and though of course I’ve retreated back round the corner many times since then, I’ve also been able to retrace my steps forwards a few times as well. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.

Unique - at my sister’s in London, trying to fathom the scale and complexity of the world. I can’t. It’s unfathomable!

Triviality - a post in which you can hear me standing up to the negative voices that are continuously rattling around my head. The more I do this, the more power I have. If you have negative thoughts, try to do this. Shine the light of awareness upon them, bring them out, analyse them, and pick apart their faulty logic. They will dissolve under the flame of attention. Then they’ll come right back. But you’ll know what to do.

Windscreen - an analogy comparing depression to having faulty windscreen wipers on your car, explaining why it’s so hard to get yourself out of low moods.

Arty Stuff

I’m the most self-conscious about my writing when it is overtly attempting to be literature or poetry. Masking your clumsy attempts at fiction under the guise of an overblown Mad Max parody, or a vignette about ghost ships, is one thing; standing in front of everyone saying “I made this thing that wants to be serious art” is another. Sincerity is scary. But I’ve made a few faltering attempts over these past six months...

Flavours - I spent a few weeks trying some fiction writing prompts. This one, involving writing a scene around a bunch of flavours, came out like a young-adult story. It was fun.

Penny for your thoughts - another writing prompt, about an executive and a homeless man.

Photographs - loose, ramshackle word streams inspired by the photographs of Steve McCurry. Why aren’t I doing this every day, as a way to unclog the clay from my mind and get the words flowing?

Mirror - a day exploring Bradford with my family.

Interstices - similar to other posts about looking for the sublime in the ordinary, but more focused on the feel and flow of the words than on an argument for the intellect.

Bollard - the last day working with my friend, a post about the sadness of endings.

Solemn - a bit of writing about the flickering joys, and dangers, of being drunk. I like some of the lines in here.

Howling - a sketch of what it feels like to work a busy weekend bar shift. I was angry when I wrote it. You can tell.

Reviews/Articles/Other

And here’s a list of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the categories above. Mostly articles about films and videogames, and the odd thought piece.

Re-Bourne - a sort of draft of a review of The Bourne Identity. Man I love this film.

Story structure - notes on the hero’s journey, the monomyth, story circles, all that good stuff.

Switch impressions - as a reward for sober blogging for 90 days I bought myself a Nintendo Switch. Wrote lots about it. Here’s one such piece.

Blade Runner, the sequel, parts 1 and 2, the original, parts 1 and 2 - lots of words about Blade Running. My love for the first film knows no bounds. The second? I can take it or leave it.

Red Dead Redissonance - wrote a few posts recently about Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Some praising the beauty of the game’s world; this one was critical of the ludonarrative dissonance at the game’s heart, and touched on what it is we want videogames to provide for us: gritty art, or a warm bath? And can we have both?

Let’s have an argument about Apu - I tried to write an article that essentially argued the opposite of what all my friends felt about the news that Apu might be written out of the Simpsons, while avoiding any ego or aggression. I wanted to try to change people’s minds, or at least provide a fresh perspective. I think it worked well actually.

OK. It’s 4am, as usual, and I cannot write any more on this. Compiling this list today and yesterday has shown me how far I’ve come. Yes, every piece has been a rushed first draft, ragged and unfinished, often starting as one thing and becoming another halfway through. Many times I’ve had a brainwave as to how I should have written the post at the point at which I’ve posted it, and it’s continuously frustrating to have to put up work I know I could make better with time, but not having any time, already being stressed that I’ve stayed up too late and eaten into my energy and resources for the next day’s post. As has happened today.

But there’s been a lot of snatches of good writing within the greater haze of words. There have been many, many words, and a not-insignificant amount of them have been good.

Drop that desire for perfection, and suddenly it’s so lovely that I’ve gone and done the work every day for 203 days now, and that that work has even momentarily helped people, made them laugh, given them pause for thought - and of course kept me from throwing myself under a bus as well.

Writing is the best. It really is.

Day 108: Photographs

Something different today. Word-sketches based on the photographs of Steve McCurry, whose work I adore. I was feeling flat and uninspired, so I looked through some pictures, opened my notebook, loosened my brain, and let the words spill out.

The door cracks in blue ointment as brusque feet splosh in plodding rain. Inky reflections run universal, a space opera splayed on tiled water, sandals slop in marching lanes. A chequered brick bracketed wonder, the wall sighing, lugubrious rain slowly flows. Drifts, dollops, sadness clinging, a loony god measures one more crying day.

- - -

The glassy luminance of a pale river. Banked greenery distantly settled. Depths of marble spread buttered castaways, sunken treasure in rising paths. Spire sparkles, heaven's glory spilling forth. Plaza houses, river paddles, minted teas by dusky banks. Cracks in glory billows breathless air in clouds rocked with gold. The air sharp, tangy. The fisherman goops in delicate joust.

- - -

Dark pupils pierce a frame of razors, wet gangles crisping locks fall coiling, massing bed of opals upon the ground. The father bent with steadfast hands of working day. Ears jut jugbowls resting on shoulder's haunch. The hair falls in glinting daggers to snitch-snitch of busy clippers, mellifluous pupils silent stare. Tight pendant weight. Necklace choker. Mother's hand cracked chestnut stone of ages. Child sat still with panther's poise.

Day 72: War

Writing prompt playing with styles, with the idea in this instance to describe something mundane about your day in the style of an epic fantasy.

Robb, son of Jack, rose gradually from the depths of his slumber. Night clung to him like an encasing shroud. He struggled to free himself, up, out of the hypnotic bindings of sleep, into the light.

He blinked and looked around. His chamber was the same as ever. His low bed, in the "futon" style popular in the distant lands of the Orient, dominated the south-facing side of the room. His writing desk, littered with papers and many virtual games of dexterity and skill, stood beside the bed. His robes were slung over a chair next to the desk. Beyond that: his guitar, resting on a machine for amplifying the ornate instrument's sound, a dressing mirror, and a collection of books, ancient tomes of wisdom and erudition from the four corners of the globe, with titles such as "Infinite Jest", and Batman: The Killing Joke".

The sun was already half risen in the sky. Robb guessed the time to be nine in the a.m., or thereabouts.

He made his way to the privy and splashed cold water on his face. The water was fresh and invigorating. Robb stared at his reflection in the looking glass on the wall, and blinked.

The witch's curse had worked its black magic once again in the night. Each evening Robb went to bed in high spirits, and each morning he awoke, dazed and morose, having been subjected to some kind of terrible affliction in the night that left his wits torn and his senses stupefied. It was as if a dark beast of some kind, terrible and unseen, was ravaging his mind as he slept.

But who was the witch that had cursed him? Robb could not recall. He could not recall anything, now he thought about it, outside this room. How long had he been in here? How many nights had passed? A thousand, all identical? Or one long and ceaseless night?

Had it perhaps been Robb's own avarice, his own experimentation with powers outside of his control, that had led to his current predicament? Or was there yet a malevolent presence outside his own comprehension casting a cruel hand across his life?

Robb did not know. But he knew he had to escape. He was a man of the North, and the blood of the first men flowed through his veins. He could sit idly by no longer. No more the many procrastinations of his life. It was a time for action. A time for fire. A time to ride!

Just then a knock came at the wooden door to his chamber.

It was his housemate.

"Kettle's on. Fancy a brew?"

He did. Robb did fancy a brew.

First, a good cup of tea. And then: to war.

Day 68: Fringe

Writing prompt about showing a character who is angry.

The fringe was sticking to Darcy's face. It was obviously sticking to her face. She had not asked for the fringe to be sticking to her face. She strode down the street, blood pumping, cursing the hairdresser.

Forty pounds. For this. Forty pounds. It was the last of her wage this week. Chris would be paying for her tea for the next two days. And wine. She needed a glass of wine tonight. Probably a bottle.

She'd almost not paid. First she'd told the new guy who'd done this to her that it wasn't what she'd wanted. He'd taken more off the sides to balance it out. That just made it shorter than she was comfortable with, and the fringe was just as bad. She'd looked at it and felt like maybe it would be all right, at first, and so she'd handed over the money and left. But now, after checking on the selfie camera on her phone, after taking a bunch of photos, she could see it was a complete disaster.

How could they let someone so inexperienced loose on paying customers' hair? It was atrocious. It was unbelievable. Didn't they practice on dummies? Wasn't this place supposed to be well-regarded? How did they think this was acceptable? How did they think they could get away with it?

Darcy stomped on.

And she had the presentation on Tuesday. The presentation. How was she supposed to deliver that confidently to the whole senior team, to Brian Rivera, to Stacy, while knowing she looked like this? While knowing she looked like a goddamned rat in makeup!

The presentation could mean everything. It was what she'd been working towards the whole time she'd been with the company. It was the culmination of so many months of effort and grind and prostration.

And now it was being ruined by some spotty runt who surely wasn't old enough to be working in a hair salon. How could he have done this to her? Darcy thought about his stupid face, that awkward smirk when she'd said she wasn't happy. Like she was supposed to feel sorry for him! How pathetic. Own your mistakes. Don't try to smirk your way out of them.

Darcy carried on walking. Maybe it wasn't all that bad. She stopped at a bus stop and clicked onto the camera app on the phone that was still clutched in her hand.

She was a mess. A bedraggled, freakish, disastrous mess.

She'd have to shave it off. There was no other option. She'd have to say she was a cancer patient.

Maybe she could get some sympathy from the team if she told them she was having chemo. Maybe they'd give her a pass.

God. That twerp. How dare he do this to her!

She was walking again. She turned a corner off the main road, kicked at a bunch of scraggy weeds sprouting under the wall to someone's garden. Who'd leave the space in front of their home in such disrepair, anyway. It was terrible.

There was a huddle of kids on the corner of the street. Darcy glowered at them, daring them in her head to stare at her. Just watch what I'll say if they shout anything about my hair, she thought. Just watch.

They said nothing. They watched her pass in silence.

Darcy continued down the road. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. She just... It was just... She couldn't even... Eeeurgh!

Evening was drawing in. It was getting dark. There were fewer people on the streets now, and her heels echoed on the paving stones as she walked.

She would go home, unload on Chris, drink all the wine, perhaps some gin and tonics, run a bath, and sort everything out in the morning. Surely someone could fix the harm that that idiot trainee had caused.

"'Scuse me. You got the time?"

It was another child. Her life was filled with children tonight.

"Sorry. No. I'm in rather a rush."

Darcy resumed her stride.

"How about you just give me your phone then?"

The boy flashing the knife was not another, but one of the same kids who had watched her pass before, and, though it was probably of little consolation to Darcy, he really hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary about her haircut at all.

Day 63: Penny for your thoughts

The same writing prompt as yesterday, but using the idiom: "A penny for your thoughts."

The homeless man sat down next to the executive. The executive made no outward movement, except to cross his right leg over his left, his moleskin chinos riding up his calf, exposing his cotton work sock and an inch of lightly tanned skin.

The executive continued to smoke his cigarette, knocking ash on the floor.

"Alright, fella" the homeless man said.

The executive nodded, looked away.

"You don't have a tab I could pinch, do you?"

"Sorry." The executive shook his head. "Last one."

The homeless man batted the apology away with his hand. "Don't worry."

The square was quieter now. You could hear the hum of taxi engines idling in the pick-up bay, the shush-clack of wheeled luggage, the rhythmic zwoosh of the automatic doors opening and closing. Above the two men the sun, bright all day, was finally going down. The light was draining from the world. There was a band of pink haze sailing to golden further down, and then, just before sky touched land, a line of brilliant blue, clear and deep as the first ocean of the world. Looking into it you could believe the universe just went on like that, uninterrupted, forever.

"Cheer up," the homeless man said. "It might never happen." He grinned with yellow teeth.

The executive pulled a brief, polite smile, made a noise in his throat that could have been one thing or the other.

"I mean it," the homeless man said. "You're best off letting it go. Don't sweat it. You know?"

The executive this time made no sound.

"I saw you here, I said to myself, there's a fella who's got his share. You can tell. Yeah. There's a bloke going through it. I saw you, I did. But am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong."

"Everyone has their share," the executive said. His shirt was crisp. He either had barely sweated into it during the heat of the day, or had changed on the train.

"I knew it. Oh I knew it." The homeless man raised his arms, as if to accept praise from an audience. "You can tell. Yeah. You can always tell."

The executive stubbed his cigarette out, shifted his weight on the bench, coughed.

"Come on then, my man," the homeless man said. "What's eating you?"

- - -

Forty minutes later the executive stood up to leave. It was dark now, and there were fewer passers-by.

The executive looked at the homeless man. "Thank you," he said."I'm sorry. Thank you. And here--"

He thrust his hand into his pocket, brought out notes, pennies, the lot. He handed it all over.

The homeless man took the wad carefully, folded it, stood up, slipped the wad into the pocket of his filthy joggers. "Hey," he said to the executive. "Good luck. Seriously."

The executive didn't know what to say in return. The two men stood facing each other. Finally, the one man put out his hand, which the other man clasped in his. They both shook.

And then the executive, picking up his leather briefcase and dipping his head, moved off into the night.

Day 62: Coming in or going out

Paul stood in the doorway of the living room. He had made it this far, but could go no further. His mother was watching Holby City with the sound up loud, a can of Dark Fruits on the coffee table beside her.

"You coming in or going out?" she called.

He was doing neither.

He'd been over it in his head, over and over, for the last three hours. But he could not, now it came to it, go all the way. He could not say it.

It was different to when you had it straight in your head. It was now and it was horrendous. His tongue felt fat in his mouth. He was dizzy. It was like he was down inside something that was wide and lashing above him. He decided to escape back up to his room.

But he couldn't come downstairs, stand in the doorway, then go back up. That would be weird. So instead he went into the front room and pretended to be studying the street out of the bay window.

"Is it bins tonight?" he asked. "I feel like it's blue bins tonight. I can't see any of the neighbours' bins. But maybe they haven't taken them out yet. I was coming downstairs and I just thought, is it blue bins tonight?"

His mum didn't look up from the screen. "Blues on Monday, moron."

"Oh, of course. Well that's good. It's almost full already, with those magazines from tidying my room and everything. I just didn't want us to forget."

"I'm glad you finally got rid of those lads mags, Paul. They're basically porn. They give you unrealistic ideas about women. You don't want to grow up like that."

Paul swallowed. It was as if God was listening, giving him his chance. It was now.

"Mum..." he began.

"I know, I know, it's gross when I talk like that. I won't say no more."

Paul could hear his heart beating. He sat and listened to his heart beating. He sat and listened and sat and listened, and slowly felt the moment slip away.

On Holby City one of the doctors was having an affair with one of the surgeons and the doctor's husband had just found out. Paul's mum drained her Dark Fruits and shook the can.

"Be a darl and get your poor old mam another cider," she said.

It was her evening off. She wasn't back in the factory while midday tomorrow.

Paul decided it would help to leave the room and gather his resources. He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, stood looking inside. He gazed at the half cauliflower, the bag of wet carrots, the crusting remains of the pasta bake from the night before. It was just Paul and his mum. She meant everything to him.

He pulled a can off the ring pull and took it back into the front room.

She mussed his hair.

He sat down next to her and looked ahead. On the telly the doctor's husband was yelling and the doctor was crying. Paul looked at the wall.

He swallowed.

He couldn't tell her.

What would the other women at the factory say? He knew how their sons all talked at school, the words they used. They had to get it from somewhere. His mum found it hard enough at work as it was. She wasn't good at making friends. He didn't want to make it harder.

But by the same token she was the most important person in the world to him. How could he not tell her?

"This show is dumb," he said.

"Shh."

"It's not... people aren't like this. Relationships aren't like this."

"You'd know, Casanova!"

He stared ahead. The room opened before him. The walls were going to swallow him. His tongue was enormous. His forehead prickled. Everything was thudding. Everything was exactly as it was.

"Mum," he said. "I threw the magazines out because I didn't need them. I didn't want them. They were just... I felt I should have them. But they weren't... what I wanted."

On Holby City the doctor's husband was the one now crying. He cried and while sobbing he said he couldn't believe that the doctor had lied to him. The doctor replied tearfully that it was their relationship that had been a lie, it bad been a lie from the start and she couldn't live that lie any longer.

Paul's mum was watching the drama. She was listening to Paul, but not hearing.

"I'm glad you didn't want them," she said.

"The thing is, Mum... the thing is... they weren't for me. Maybe other magazines, but not those."

His mum turned to him. "Paul," she said. "It's OK. I understand."

Paul looked at his mum.

"You don't have to be ashamed," she said. "I won't judge you."

The air was alive in front of Paul's face. The air was electric.

"You don't have to make excuses," his mum said. "Don't worry what I said before. It's completely natural for you to enjoy looking at a bit of bush." She let out a long cackle. "You're a healthy boy. There's nowt wrong with it."

But that was almost precisely the problem.

Paul let his breath out a long, long way. He let his shoulders sag. He couldn't say it. How could you say it?

On the television the husband wrestled with the doctor fiercely and the two crashed through the apartment, into the bookcase, around the dresser, through the balcony doors, over the railing, and down to the street below, the lie they had been living finally having engulfed them both.

The credits played, and then the news, and then Paul went back upstairs.

- - -

So that was a writing prompt called Idiomatic. It involved creating a scene based on an idiom -- in this case "Beat around the bush" -- which scene had to also contain the literal use of one of the figurative words from the phrase -- so here it was the word "bush".

I didn't get there, I don't feel, it didn't quite come together. But it was fun trying, and it's 03:30 now after a long shift and I have to put this up and go to bed. Back on the open tomorrow, for my sins. TTFN

Day 61: She should eat

Another show-don't-tell writing prompt, this time attempting to express the feeling of depression.

Claire's bedroom was thick with the smell of damp. The washed clothes had been sitting in the machine for a day and a night and half a day again, and now Claire had finally hung the creased shirts and skirts and jeans over her clothes horse they were giving off an acrid, wet-dog stench that was permeating the room.

Claire gave up and climbed into bed. The quilt was a tangled mess by her legs, stained with the crusty spillage of some microwaved meal or other, and she kicked at the wad until it rolled off the foot of the bed and landed in a heap on the floor, on top of a pile of folded print-outs from a lecture from months ago.

She'd only been to two lectures since then.

The laptop was going, playing a series on Netflix that Claire had enjoyed as a child. She'd meant to put on a documentary or a foreign film or something that would be good for her intellectual development, but had somehow ended up with this series instead.

She stared at the screen. The main character, an American high-school troublemaker, was plotting how to go on a date with two girls from his class at the same end-of-term summer luau.

Claire watched the show without seeing. She fidgeted with her hair, scratched at her skin. She had a small rash on her stomach. She tried not to scratch it. She gave up and scratched it. She watched the show. After a while, halfway through a scene, she closed the lid of the laptop and lay back into her pillow.

She dozed fitfully for an hour. When she awoke it was beginning to get dark. her blind was already half closed. She pulled it down all the way and turned on the light.

She should eat. She should eat. She should eat. She wrenched herself to the edge of her bed and looked down at the teetering collection of plates and coffee mugs and bowls on the carpet. The plates were covered in the crumbs of toast and pizza; the mugs had rings of congealing residue in the bottom. The bowls were a sugary, milky mess.

She turned herself back over, lay there looking up at the ceiling.

In the corner of the ceiling were the fine scraggly remains of a cobweb. The strands were dancing in the draft coming in through the window. So what? The spider that had woven the web was dead now. So what? Claire watched the silk tilt and sway, watched it, saw it, saw that it meant nothing, saw and saw, closed her eyes, kept her eyes closed.

The evening wore on.

Day 59: Feels

The email came through to his work address. She usually WhatsApped, or called. He didn't think he'd even given her this email address. She must have found it somewhere online.

He read the message. Then he went back and read it again. Half an hour later, when Pat came to his cubicle to hand him the morning's sketches, he was still reading those three paragraphs -- for three paragraphs was all she had written him.

He minimised his email window, brought up the layout plans.

"How goes it?" Pat asked, ruffling his hair.

"Oh, fine," he replied.

When Pat left he got the email back up again.

Three paragraphs. That was all.

He looked at his hands on the keys of his keyboard. He looked at his wallet on his desk. The leather-bound day planner with the scruff on the front. The potted cactus, needing so little, needing something. "Like you," she had said. Before.

He looked at Percy, the green arms wrapped around his desk tidy in the corner. He looked in the dinosaur's big eyes. He reached out and touched the soft head, then took the toy's tiny hand in his own larger hand, held it tight.

He sat like that until Nikki came to see how the design was going. he let go of Percy, pretended to be arranging his desk.

"You OK, pal?"

"Oh, yes. I've got some errands to run this afternoon though."

He walked without knowing where he was going. The streets repeated. Kebab shops being set up for opening, overflowing bins, the little parks, the bus stops, the offices. They flitted by.

He found himself outside a large department store. Through the big glass doors he could see mothers dragging their recalcitrant children, elderly couples shuffling along, a gaggle of store workers stood around the perfume counter gossiping, touching each other on the arms, putting their hands over their mouths, all bending over in laughter.

The sun was going down and the street was getting dark, but inside all were lit by a warm glow.

He stood outside and looked in.

"May I ask, sir, whether you are happy with your current broadband supplier?"

The man with the clipboard was young, with a sharp stubble line and a piercing in one ear. There were flakes of dried wax in his hair. He had only made three referrals today. It was looking like another bad one. Well, he'd buy another of those six-packs on offer after work, roll a fatty, see if anyone online was up for a raid or two. There was always tomorrow.

The man he was addressing turned, and for one terrible moment the man with the clipboard thought the other was planning to attack him. What the other did instead was teeter, and then collapse into the folds of the man with the clipboard's coat.

Through the thick fabric and the rocking sobs the man with the clipboard caught only two words:

"She's gone."

- - -

That was a writing prompt to create a scene where a character was "upset about the news he had received", written without any "feeling" words. So no saying "he felt sad," for example. I think it could have gone better, but I was out looking at alpacas and climbing trees with Mike and Zoe all day, and then I collapsed when I got in. What can you do? You can't hear about an alpaca farm and not instantly go there. They're alpacas, for Chrissake!

Day 58: Flavours

Another writing prompt, this one about noting down 12 flavours, of ice cream, sweet, savoury food, whatever, and then writing a scene including all the flavours, starting with the words "The sparkling water was..."

The sparkling water was tangy, like Stilton, on Booker's tongue. She swallowed it down and looked out at the horizon. The first of the drop ships were landing on the ridge to the east. By the end of the night royalist troops should have taken back the city, and fresh supplies -- including clean drinking water -- would hopefully begin to flow out to the camps once again.

Booker took a bacon-and-cauliflower-bake capsule from her pack and snapped it open, and poured the drops of concentrated liquid within onto her ration of boiled cabbage. She ate hungrily, trying not to look down at her fork.

The sky was dark and the polythene cover of her compartment snapped in the wind. Booker sat on the corrugated tin roof, painted mint green to signify her refugee status, and settled in to watch the fireworks. Hundreds of miles away balls of orange flame popped like exploding grapefruit against the black of the sky. The royalist aerial bombardment had begun. Scattered plasma fire, pink like the bubblegum Booker had once chewed with her classmates at school, ripped loosely into the night -- Iphal militia fighting back.

Booker thought about her school, wondered whether any of those fiery blooms in the distance was the site of her childhood memories going up in smoke. She thought she remembered rebels taking the school as a stronghold, after Arch Pasha Monsul promised to free the country. But maybe that was the gym. Those days had been a blur. Booker hadn't wanted to leave home because she had been baking pecan slices in the reactor oven -- she hadn't understood, was annoyed at her father, but he had grabbed her wrists and pulled her to the door, and Booker had been halfway to yelling, had felt full of fury, but then she had seen the worry and terror in his face, and had fallen silent.

She thought then about her father's whiskers, about the scent of chocolate and vanilla on his skin when he used to return home from the factory and put his ID and payment chips on the sideboard and gather Booker in his arms...

She didn't want to think about that. She chewed the last of the mush in her bowl, licked it clean, and stowed it back through the flap that was the one window of her hut.

The plasma fire was more sporadic now; Iphal were losing.

Everything was as Monsul's soldiers, clean and fastidious in their caramel uniforms, had said it would be. They had marched through the camps two days ago, handing out lemons and loaves and that funky-tasting sparkling water, and promised that the city would be freed by the end of the week. Some refugees had cheered. Most, like Booker, had looked on, starved and exhausted, wondering whether these tall warriors were going to undo the last three years, wipe the survivors memories clean of the atrocities they had witnessed, or whether these new liberators would be another layer added to the palimpsest of this small but bloodied country, scratching their mark crudely over the top, yet never quite erasing the horrors that had gone before.

Away at the edge of sight another fireball erupted, and Booker, sitting with the wind whipping at her skinny legs, perched on top of her makeshift house, watched as her town was demolished with engines of fire so that the charred remains could in the morning be presented back to her. She sighed, and looked out.

Day 57: The locker

They kept the head out of sight. They chopped off the head but they kept it out of sight.

It was a bright and blown out day as I walked down to the house on the corner. The national football team had won that morning and there were groups of revellers still swaying out of the pubs, thumping one another on the arms and singing snatches of patriotic songs. Families bobbed down the hill on the way to town: mothers in sandals that slapped on the hot tarmac, fathers pushing prams with gaudy helium balloons tied round the handles. The warm weather had turned the city into a festival.

But as I walked round the high street the crowds began to thin. As the road dipped I passed into shadow and shivered, cold now I was out of the sun. I had been to the house before but found myself lost in the coiling warren of streets leading down to the valley, and I had to consult the map on my phone to find my way. Men taking advantage of the day to wash their cars stared up at me as I passed, their eyes suspicious under their flat caps. I nodded stiffly and continued on my way.

I heard the party before I saw the house. I heard laughter, the murmur of voices, the clink of glasses drifting across the little gardens with their hanging trees. Suddenly the side passage loomed before me. I steeled myself, and went in.

At the party were people I knew, and people I did not. I scanned the faces and saw gaiety, ease, yet underneath something else. It was subtle but it was there. I saw hunger.

None of the guests were eating. The host came out numerous times, then went back inside the house. Next door a family were getting ready to leave for an afternoon out; there was a picnic bag, cameras, games for the children, and I got the impression that our host was waiting for these simple folk to depart before he commenced our proceedings.

There was no mistaking it, a palpable air of anticipation now filled the garden. The house was built into the side of a steep hill, and the garden stepped down on crooked levels. The guests were congregated on the patio on the lowest step, huddled on chairs and stools. The positioning of the trees and fences meant that this small area was entirely hidden from the outside world. On the top step of the garden was a table with supplies arrayed upon it.

Between the guests and the table stood the locker. The host had brought this locker specially for the occasion. It was old and chipped. The inner shelves had been removed and discarded. The locker's door was closed tight, a deep colour smeared around the handle.

We waited.

Finally the neighbours left, and the host emerged from the darkness of the house. In one hand he carried tongs; in the other a large metal cleaver.

The door of the locker was swung open. The head had already been chopped off and was kept out of sight. The host removed the smoked body, and the party, held in check for so many hours, was now able to begin.

- - -

So that was a writing prompt I came across, an exercise that suggested writing about your day as if it were a mystery story (though I guess I wrote more of a horror?). Arron and Pat smoked a pig, is what happened, and had everyone round to Arron's for a barbecue. Being a vegetarian I wasn't exactly elated at the idea, but the animal had been ethically farmed, and I do think if you're going to eat a living creature it's only right that you take responsibility for that, are prepared to do the butchering yourself. Anyway, I ate veggie burger, hung out for a while, then came home. Now I'm going to leave this here because I've been going to bed way too late recently, and if I stop right now I can read for half an hour in bed and still get a good night's sleep before work in the morning, and to be honest that sounds sublime.

Ciao x

Faking It

Character sketch for the fiction course...

Laurie sat, legs crossed, reclining slightly, left hand cupped beneath the bar, right hand ripping at the corner of a bottled-lager-branded beermat, sienna hair falling over bare shoulders, drinking her Martell brandy, thinking how you couldn't compare. Comparison was the mother of... It was a path to... It fucked you all kinds of up, is what it did.

Not that she was comparing with the best of them. Not with those... things. The undulating ones over there on the dance-floor, those shimmering sirens for whom the surrounding men were practically spasming-out in orgiastic fervour. They were welcome to it. I mean obviously, if given the... but you had to be realistic. She'd let them have the beauty and the glamour and the riches, if they'd let her have an ordinary life.

Ordinary. But you couldn't compare. Each life was unique, uniquely felt. You couldn't lay one on top of another and say the peaks here are higher, the troughs there not so deep. From the inside, each life was terrible enough.

Still though. To be an averagely attractive woman. A bit fat, even. She'd take fat. A plain, plump girl -- someone who'd maybe had to wait until second year of university to lose her virginity, but had (lost it), to perhaps a computer programmer living on her floor, who'd played drums with zero rhythm and had moved on top of her with even less, who'd spent three months of evenings curled beside her watching his little portable television as the two of them gradually realised how little they had in common.

Laurie would have taken this. She would have taken this gladly. But you couldn't. You couldn't.

She swirled the nubbin of ice in her glass, brushed the hair from her broad face with a move she thought of as "defiantly feminine" -- which sounded nice but did not, in the end, assuage the feelings of ugliness and ungainliness that bubbled up at her -- and she considered the possibility of being taken home tonight.

49.05 percent of the country's population was male. Of this number, maybe 20 percent might see Laurie on first appearance as anything more than a twisted monster, an aberration, a faggot. Maybe one percent of this number, maybe less, would see her not as an object of pity or sympathy but as a woman in her own right, someone they could legitimately be attracted to.

There were, at best guess, 80 people in this bar, which did not exactly stack the odds, the fucking piece of shit fucking god fucking damned odds, in her, in, fucking...

She wrenched her thoughts away. She ordered another brandy from the barman who was trying not to look, she tore at the bar mat, she drank the brandy. The worst was in truth behind her. She no longer felt at war with her own body. More like a refugee making camp in a war-torn land, hanging fairy-lights around the barbed wire, laying rugs at the bottom of trenches, doing the best with an alien landscape that would never quite be home. If she sometimes still thought briefly of open skies, of a short plunge and then endless expansive peace, the borders of her being marked by the stars themselves, well, that wasn't so uncommon.

She was not, she had been assured, mentally unstable. Rigorous psychological evaluations prior to the multiple medical procedures on which she had spent all her savings had made certain of this fact -- though of course she allowed secretly to herself that maybe she was just good enough at faking it. But then wasn't that, when it came right down to it, the best any of us could say: that we were good enough at faking it?

Laurie (née Daniel) Staples, 28, alone once again on New Year's Eve, composed and demure and, yes, beautiful in a sequinned azure dress, drinking overpriced brandy and contemplating the smudged and fiery walk home by herself to a flat without central heating or companionship, did not then feel it but was, in this moment and for all moments after it, loved.

Full

Another wee thing from the fiction course. Can't be bothered doing anything with it so I'll just leave it here for your delectation...

The businessman sat down two seats ahead. The collar of his expensive coat was turned up and flecked with droplets of what moments before had been snow. Thinking himself alone, I presumed, for I was hunched as usual into my seat and mostly hidden, the man took out his phone and held it to his lips. He began speaking rapidly into its screen. "You are in for it this time," he said. "You are ruined. I will ruin you. I will smear you into my carpet. I will squelch you. Eviscerate and obliterate both, believe you me. I am the heel, you are the worm. You will rue the day. Oh you will rue... I will spank you. Be prepared. You are in for a spanking. You dirty, you repugnant... I will fondle your toes. I will cause you to whimper. I will call into action the largest of my toys. You putrid blemish. You worthless, squirming--" The man's phone at this moment buzzed and his ringtone played. "Hello?" he answered. "No. Kevin: no. I have left the office. I am distinctly suburbs-bound. What you're asking of me would be quite impossible. I don't care how important. My schedule for the next evening is, I regret to inform you, capital-F-in-largest-filigreed-font full."

Slouch

The high-street was dark and the snow bunched beside doorways and you could see the puffs of breath from the shoppers bustling home, but as I ordered my tall black and looked for a seat I felt none of the sadness that these conditions usually engender in me.

My surprise grew when I shrugged off my coat in front of the three remaining customers and the two baristas, and instead of anxiety at being seen I experienced a great welling of comfort melting the corners of the room and drawing our plucky group together. This was a sensation many years ago I would have associated exclusively with my first brandy of the night.

The boy brought over my coffee and I thanked him. He gathered up the gratitude and took it into himself, so it felt, and then he went back to leaning on the counter and watching the clock. I cannot normally abide this, clock-watching by employees in the service industry, betraying, as it does, the employees' contempt for their surroundings, of which (it doesn't take a genius to extrapolate) I as a customer am clearly a part. But here I felt no bile rising. To the contrary, looking at this boy, I was struck by the notion that my sense of well-being was in fact emanating from him; a notion that, once examined, I saw to be true.

I watched the boy. He had full lips, black hair, a complexion that would have been olive-skinned had the sun ever figured out how to reach this godforsaken city of ours. The boy's eyes were fierce and bright, his body lithe in angled insouciance. He made a joke to the girl wiping tables, his dark-haired and gently-muscled arms very much there in the space between boy and girl, and the girl laughed. The other patrons smiled. I smiled. We were all old friends. We all felt marvellous.

After a time the boy slouched off to bring in the outdoor furniture, and I figured it out. It was this slouch, its nonchalant air of cool and confident rebellion. A subtle rebellion -- no manager could have brought it up without sounding insane, for in all other regards the boy appeared sufficient -- but rebellion nonetheless, a way of giving everything officially asked of him while still holding something back. He gave his manners, his attention -- his time -- and what he held back may only have been tiny, but it was vital. His slouch belonged to him, they could not have it, and this mattered. And because it mattered the boy could remain, through banality and tedium, himself. And because he could remain himself, he could be happy.

Yes. This kid wouldn't complain if asked to bring in a beer garden in the rain. He would let co-workers take their breaks before him. He came to shifts on time, awake, alive.

He was back, now, clearing a customer's plate, calling the man dude without affectation (I have never got the hang of this word, its roundness sounding so vulgar and American in my mouth). He had the key to it all, this kid, to every stinking thing, and I loved him for it.

I would wait until he was behind the counter again and then hand him my empty mug. The nod he would give me, the small moment we would share: this would solve everything.

Places

Hello, jambalayas. Here's a little exercise from the online fiction-writing course I've been doing recently, just because I know I've not been giving this blog the attention it deserves. The exercise was about describing our ideal writing environment, and then an environment in which we'd find it difficult or bizarre to write. Second guy is a bit of a cheap Bukowski clone, but whatevs. 

Picture it: the quality of sunlight when you share the world with only insects, the nascent light filtering through the glass, the cottage still cold. Coffee sings on the stove. Karen is asleep upstairs, you can just bet doing that thing with her feet skewed out from the tangle of sheets, splayed like a spider. Let her lie. Down here the computer is on, but only so Stan Getz can play to the empty morning. You open your notebook and leaf through pages, breathing in the smell. The carpet is freshly hoovered, the floor clear. Open space in the middle, jumble around the edges: like your mind. The desk is wooden and ancient; it remembers. The chair is modern, though tempered by cushions Karen has knitted in Yorkshire wool. Post-it notes, colours sucked by time, plaster the walls. A newspaper-clipping photograph of a lonely Greek island. Smudged ash of incense on your arm. Soft pencils. Old mugs. The cat home from crepuscular wanderings, paws damp, eyes bright, mewling to be fed. Everything else in here is books.

***

Carl was three or five beers down and looking at an ice-cream cone upended and melting into the mud. Nothing sadder. The neon of the Screamer flashed in the distance as its left arm dropped. A maddened, robotic giant, beating the ground in forlorn death throes, Carl always thought. The smell of rancid burgers wafted.Yelps of kids, guffaws of teenagers scaring their dates. The grass was trodden away here behind the stall, and Carl's plastic chair was digging into the dirt. The magic of the carnival was gossamer-thin at best, but back here the veneer was non-existent. The utilitarian sadness of the insides of attractions, unfinished pine and leaking sand bags and old tins of paint. Carl slugged his beer, leaned back. The grease and astroturf and ticket stubs and scum of candy-floss were ugly, yes, but they were his ugliness, as intrinsic to him as the hair on his toes or the brush of acne along his brow. He needed it all, needed the dirt to write his dirty stories, so beloved of those small publishers in Europe. The glow from the burger van washed across the cheap notebook, and Carl bent to it. He'd be here all night.