What Makes You Really, Really Angry?

I wrote this little poem in response to a request for poems about Thanksgiving from Kerry O'Connor at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. So here's a picture of a Real Toad, sadly not an imaginary one, indulging in one of those quaint traditions that makes America the Greatest Nation on Earth.

It meets the 55 word allowance for G-Man's Friday Flash Fiction, so let's electrocute or otherwise terminate with extreme prejudice, two birds with one stone. 

Pardon

If you're full-breasted, feathered, tender, lucky
Mister President may save you from the pot
and you'll give thanks for this Thanksgiving -

but if you're poor, uneducated, black,
and some thumbs-in-gunbelt sheriff, real hot-shot
and white cops and judge and jury all say "It's HIM!"
and point you to Death Row -

he certainly will not.

Magpie Tales#89

Tess Kincaid's picture prompt this week is from a bygone age -

     It's Halloween.
   Zack is working late most nights, finishing his doctorate thesis on African tribal masks. He works in the room we call the lounge, hunched over his PC, and if the bedroom door is open I can hear the keyboard pattering, but mostly I hear Zack cursing - Windows, the printer, the memory stick he left in the Department, or himself for leaving it, or "How the hell do you spell 'tautological' anyway?"   He's onto the section "Death Masks." He reckons he'll finish a draft to show his supervisor by mid-November.  It's been slow going; one reason is he has to be careful to avoid taboos. Someone might read it. Unlikely, but you never know.

  "Go to bed, Pumpkin," he says. "I won't be long."  He makes us both malted milk and sits on the edge of the bed to chat for a bit, then decamps to his desk . . big old cupboard door on two saw-horses, we haven't much money, just each other. He leaves the door ajar.

* * * * 

   I woke suddenly and my first thought was, it was raining. Then I clocked that Zack had come to bed, that he had left the desk light on where he'd been working and that it wasn't rain on the window I could hear. Too regular. Too mechanical. Too loud.  I sat up and shook him. He stirred. He sleeps like a hippopotamus, I mean he wallows in sleep and the duvet.

    "Zack!  I can hear a typewriter." I shivered.

    "Billy" he said, coming to. "I mean don't be silly, Luce."

    "No, Zack. Listen." It's not a sound you can easily mistake. 

    "That's an electric," he said, listening now, sitting up alongside.

   "Zack, there's no typewriter in the flat, electric, clockwork, whatever. We have never had - "

    We heard a carriage return. Then the keystrokes sounded again, with pauses, the way you pause when you're thinking what to put next.  Then I knew he was scared and he knew I was scared and we hunched closer to each other.  "I don't like this."

    It got scarier. We heard chairlegs scrape, and the light coming through the part open door dimmed as if someone walked in front of it - once, twice before the typing started over. Only this time just five keystrokes, pause, five keystrokes, pause. And again, always five, typed slowly, as with one finger.

    He swung his legs from under the duvet, pulled on boxers. "Must sort this," he said, but I could feel him trembling.

  "Zack, I'm frightened."  In a whisper.  He patted my shoulder as if seeking as well as giving reassurance.  "Some pillock undergraduate got in scare the crap out of us. Trick or treat us."

    "What," I said, still sotto voce, "Bring your own typewriter?"

    But as he went to the door the light went out and the lounge was as quiet as it should be at . . . one minute past midnight, our little clock showed.  I clicked the bedside light on and said "Be careful, love."

    More light as he switched on the lounge overhead. He was back in only a few seconds, holding a single sheet of A4, shaking his head. He said, "Where do you begin when there's nowhere to begin from?  There's no one there. And no typewriter. Did we really think there would be? But look at this."  He gave me the A4 paper.  In a column of centered text, about 24 point Helvetica, bigger than any typewriter could print it read:

Wrong  Write  Books  Masks  Blood  Bones  Warns  Death

  "The computer's still switched on" he said, as if that explained everything, anything. "And there was this. Left beside it." He dropped something in my palm.
   Slender, white, hard. A finger bone.
   We looked at each other a long time.

Fearless Challenge

Kellie Elmore at "Magic in the Backyard" exhorts writers to be less fearful, to tackle 'taboo' subjects head on . . 


Breathe On Me

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to this -

Your lips, your fingertips be my awaking.

Breathe on my waiting eyes and take your kiss

to the twinned roses where my need is aching.

Breathe where beneath your breath my self is yearning,

where flesh engorges. Breath till your breath like fire

blown into flame, set by the wind's breath burning

fans into life my embers of desire.

Breathe on my limbs, my slopes, my globes, my curves 

Breathe on my secret sheaves, my readied portal -

Now, now, now, now the last shreds of reserve

are cast away, and this joy makes us mortal.

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to sleep.
Let lips, let fingertips be lullabies

sung as the slow moon past our window creeps,

let the spent dregs of passion close our eyes.

Magpie Tales#82

Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor uses another picture (below) for our starting point this week - Andrew Wyeth's "The Revenant" (1949)

Aftermath

   Time was they were called 'push-chairs'; modern marketing has them as 'strollers.' My sister's had been mine, handed on after years stowed in Dad's garage. I was eight years older than Julia and I earned pocket money cleaning it and then I was the one who insisted on pushing her on family walks or to Gran's or the shops with Mum when I wasn't at school and I wanted to tell everyone we saw that this was my little sister. When she grew out of it I think it went to charity. 

   This before the bad time, when Julia lost her pregnancy at three months and Zack and I separated, since when the stroller has haunted me, though it hasn't been so bad since Julia and I were reconciled. I mean, the dreams are not as frequent, and mostly only when I'm under the weather or it's my period.

   They begin with my bedroom door opening. I'll be awake enough to want not to dream, but I know the dream will happen anyway, and I hear myself or some disembodied voice saying "Who? Who?" I see the stroller coming in. First the single front wheel, then the seat part, the rear wheels, the push handle. The rain canopy is up, the occupant screened. My dreaming mind always hopes someone will be pushing it. No one ever is. The stroller trundles to the end of my bed and turns itself to me.  The duvet is unyielding. I cannot pull it up to screen myself. The dream will not let me not see.

   If it's Julia it's not so bad and I feel the relief even though she is tiny, like a two year old. She says nothing but holds out her adult baby hands as though imploring me not to hit her and doesn't hear me cry out that I won't ever again, hit you, hit you, ever again love, only come home. Come home, Joo.

   If it's Zack he glowers and hauls himself out of the seat and stands at the end of my bed and it would be funny if I wasn't dreaming to see a three foot tall husband carrying a toy panda called Sydney shouting how I'd enjoy having my lezza sister tucked up in there with me, wouldn't I; funny until he gets up onto the bed in his yellow babygro and tries to hold and kiss me.

   But mostly its the foetus, the homunculus that Julia conceived with Zack, that her womb shed too soon for him to live. My sister's blood stains the shawl the dream has dressed him in and his small skull lolls and his perfect hands flex and curl and the half formed lips form something that looks like Lu-cy, and then my own tears save me and I wake. Except sometimes I only dream I've woken, and the stroller is still there, empty and accusing and I shriek.

   Is all this because I blame myself? When I saw that I had married a child - oh yes, what Zack really wanted was a Mother he could get to sleep with - was it my aloofness that drove him to Julia? Was it her generous nature, nurtured by the loving Big Sister who pushed her stroller, that accepted him?

   Or that I might have become aunt to my sister's child by my husband, had not horror intervened? And now - is it that my ghosts are unquiet and will ever haunt the tormented part of me that was glad her baby died?

   

  

Magpie Tales#81

A Stranding

 "Look, Willow - dolphins!" Miss Warburton held the tabby cat to the car window, supporting the little head, rubbing her forefinger behind its tattered ear. "They won't mind the rain."  It streamed down the windscreen where the wipers had stopped.

  The dolphins - she reckoned seven maybe eight - wove around the car nudging it as if it were one of them, and, rising above the surface on their tailfins, knocked against the glass and looked in at her and the cat. The water had risen to the level of her seat, and now her feet, under the water, still on the pedals, were cold.

  "Nothing to be scared of, Willow," she said. "Dolphins are friendly to people. They help. They'll wonder what we're doing here. Shall we . . " She laid the cat in its basket on her lap and tucked in its blanket. "Shall we let them in?" She pressed the switch to open the driver's side window but nothing happened.  "Water in the wiring I suppose", and yes, the water was now rising toward the dash, covering her knees, soaking her heavy tweed skirt. But she could twist round  and just . . just reach the handle that wound down the rear window. "Let's finish it," she said, and turned the handle.

  In a few minutes more the rising tide sent water spilling through the open window. Miss Warburton stroked the cat and put the basket on the dash, against the windscreen, and closed her eyes and felt the cold seeping up to her waist. She waited.  The car rocked, rocked and she thought this must be the tide-rip moving it, floating it out to sea, and she opened her eyes again and saw the dolphins had gone, all but one, whose dorsal fin cut through the water ahead of the car, heading toward the rain-shrouded shore. But somehow the car was following it, and was now higher in the water, and the rocking was because it was surely floating, surely it was floating. And then she knew! The dolphins were underneath it, lifting and guiding it on their lifeboat backs and she made a low moan  and said "No, friends, no. Please no! You don't see. You don't understand." Her eyes closed again. She tasted seawater. Her greying hair floated up behind her. For a while the wickerwork cat-basket floated too, but was soon submerged. The car settled.

 * * * *

  Next morning at low tide a police vehicle drove down the shingle beach and across the sandbars to check out an abandoned car, about four hundred metres off shore.  Two policemen got out, looked into the car, opened the driver's door, shook their heads. Seawater dribbled.

  "This motor wasn't dumped," said one."And too late for an ambulance. Poor old soul. Got bogged down . . "

 "No, she didn't. Sand's quite firm." The second policeman's heelkick barely marked the surface "No sign of  trenching where she would've revved to get free. This motor was never bogged down. Some puzzle this. What was she doing here, for any's sake?" Then they noticed a cat in a sodden basket in the floor well still full of water, and one of them said, "God Almighty."

  The coroner's inquest found that Miss Warburton, a elderly lady who lived locally by herself and kept herself to herself, driving alone and in fading twilight, had drowned when her car became immobilised, although no cause of breakdown was found.
  The tabby cat, it was noted, had not drowned and had been dead at least four days.

(The picture-prompt below from Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor, and ideas from other Magpie posts were the starting point for this one. Many more entries can be found by clicking the link.)

   

  

Magpie Tales#80

Thanks to Tess Kincaid whose photo by Christopher Shay suggested this week's Magpie, and many more. 

"Hale Watter" 

  I logged out and turned the monitor off, left the Computing Suite and went down to the atrium. And stopped.  Outside you could barely see through the rain. Inside, folk were gathered, waiting for it to stop, and it looked like any day now it would oblige.

  My Gran had an expression for rain like this. "It's dingin' doon hale watter, Lucy," she'd say, her Scottish roots peeping. Too right! Gusts of wind sent hale watter lashing against the atrium's block-glass walls and running down in curtains. The deluge bounced off the forecourt paving. Vehicles on the driveway leading to the Main Gate threw up bow-waves like boats.

  Problem. It was very sincerely and determinedly pissing down. I had my little umbrella, more a fashion accessory than a piece of wet weather kit. Forget it, Luce. It's no contest. This rain would kill my umbrella in seconds. Instead, I went to the cafeteria and threaded through the yellow "Caution. Wet floor" cones, joined the queue, sat down with a latté and a danish pastry and texted Zack at the flat to say I was marooned at the Uni until Mr. Sunshine put his hat on again.  "Where?" he replied. "Computing Suite snack bar. For the duration by the look of it." "Don't move, Luce. You could drown! I'll send help." "Bless you, Z."  The sort of texts that new lovers do when both have mobes and 200 free texts if we top-up before sometime-next-month.

  I'd finished the pastry and was wondering about another latté and what form his help would take. A teleport back to the flat would be nice, even though it was two streets, seven minutes walk max., but seven minutes in this would turn my umbrella inside out and soak me to the skin. A teleport and a bath and Zack.

  My phone pinged again. "Those guys in your Product Design and Development should work on this!"

  Zack gets to the point like water gets down the plughole - tangentially.

  I knew I was going to regret my . .  "Work on what, Z?" but this is the way young love humours itself, yes?

 I sent the text. I waited. My phone sounded again. It's one of those smartphones. Sends and receives pictures, videos, sound files. It will Twitter and Facebook and do searches, and if you want, you can squint your way through whole books on its little screen.  I selected "Show Message."

   Just "HOHOHO!" and a picture . . .

but before the first "Grrrr!" had died on my lips and my fingers begun "Very Funny" onto the keys, the tannoy ding-donged and announced "Taxi for Ms. Westenra.  Lucy Westenra to the atrium, please." - the way young love . . er . . loves, yes?

Magpie Tales#78

The Writing's on the Wall

   When I moved into Zack's rented flat Mum said "You mean you and Zack are engaged?"  "No, Mum, it doesn't work like that anymore." Seeing her doubtful look, I said "We'll probably get married eventually. But not straightaway or anything. We've our Ph.D theses to finish."  

   The flat wasn't too bad except for the bedroom, which was done out in a 1960's wallpaper with huge yellow, orange and white flowers, so loud you could almost hear them. Certainly loud enough to give us insomnia. I guessed the paper had been up for forty years, but Zack said no, he'd found five rolls of the stuff in a cupboard when he moved in. With his then girl friend he'd scraped off earlier layers, one of which was Victorian, dark green and varnished. "Hell of a job," he said, "took absolute ages." Then they pasted up the Garden of Delights. "Kind of retro. We liked it. At first."

   So we got busy. Day One, we bought stripping knives, scrapers and a stepladder. We hired a steam stripper, a magic piece of kit. On Day Two I was up the ladder peeling off flowery grot I'd previously steamed.  Sometimes a whole width just about fell off the wall, a satisfying feeling, denuding several square metres in no time leaving bare plaster ready for white emulsion.  The piece in the corner next to the door was coming away nicely when I stopped, glanced at Zack who, gallant as ever was attacking some remaining bits of the green varnished stuff at skirting board level. So he didn't see me roughly manhandle the falling flowers back onto the wall and hold them there one-handed.

  "Zack love, what happened to the friend who helped you strip?'

  He dropped his scraper.

  "The paper, Zack. Strip the old paper. When you stuck up this ghastly stuff."

  "For a minute I thought you meant - We didn't really get on. Didn't last long after we finished the room."

  "Why?" I wanted to know, looking down on him from my perch, pressing my lips together not to laugh.

  "We were, like, incompatible."

  "In what way?"

  "Truth to tell,"he said, "she was about as much fun as a dead sheep. Why the sudden interest?"

  "Just that I imagined her up here where I am, erm . . helping you." I said, then, "Right! Nearly finished this lot. Time for a coffee."

   I took one last look. Right at the top of the wall where I had just dislodged another bunch of the horrible flowers, someone had written in pencil, in very small caps that I scratched out with my scraper in case he should see  -

  'MOST WALLPAPERS ARE BETTER HUNG THAN YOU, ZACKO!'  

  Nice one from a dead sheep!


(This is just one of many responses to Tess Kincaid's wonderful picture prompt this week.  You can find the others HERE)

Magpie Tales, 18th July

Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening!

  I was invited for drinks and canapes in the Principal's Residence along with other post-graduate students from the Departments of Mathematics, Computing, and Anthropology. Must have added up to fifty or sixty of us. The Residence is in the South Quadrangle in the mock-Gothic part of the University. It's Grace-and-Favour, of course, but the Principal was forever quipping that "Margaret and I have to put up with living in a tied cottage!" Some stonework renovations were in progress and right in front of the windows facing onto the quadrangle, a tastefully placed rubbish skip with a wide plastic chute from an upper floor of the cottage, for conveying debris.
   The Principal - a really nice man, it must be said - and his tiny wife, so welcoming, so friendly, from time to time hosted gatherings for all the post-grads in the University, and - fair do's - they didn't tap some slush fund to pay for them, but bought in the stuff themselves.  I used to see them on a Saturday mornings in Tesco, a trolley each, groaning with liquor and frozen sausage rolls, in their padded anoraks. They sort of knew me and nodded and they were, yes, really nice, friendly guys.

   "Come away in, dear," said Mrs. Principal, very Scottish, when I pressed the door-chime. "Montgomery tells me you're Computing?  Lauren . .  ?"
   I had to decide whether to be Lauren for the evening, and compromised. "But everyone calls me Lucy."

   "I see you in your pixie, don't I?"
   I guessed she meant my Peter Storm kagoul with the hood up against an East Anglian blizzard. There's really nothing between here and the Urals and we got some rare blows. I decided she was sweet.

   She led me into their big ground floor lounge. The rubbish chute was right outside the window. The Principal in shirt sleeves, chinos and loafers was pouring out and handing drinks.  A tall guy took one and passed it in to me.
   "Thanks!"
    "Zack Chesters," he said. "Anthropology. Masks."
    "Lucy. But Mr. and Mrs. seem to think I'm Lauren.  Masks what?"
    "Say again?"  He had a nice beard and a pleasant grin and seemed an O.K. guy.
    "You said anthropology masks. But not what."
    "Let's start again, Lauren or Lucy. . . "
   So we got him sorted out. Zack Chesters. Researching African war masks in the Anthropology Department.  He made a mock-leery face and said how he had lots of masks scanned into his PC and I must come up and see them some time.  We talked about war masks and wars and argued whether the International Space Station was a waste of money. He said you shouldn't put a price on human curiosity and so on, the usual earnest discussions that students have before life and writing their dissertations start beating them up. And we had a few glasses of wine, or a few too many, Tesco's finest, until the Principal tapped a glass with a spoon to call for silence. I leaned against this interesting Zack and he said "Sshhh!" rather too loud, drawing glances, and I had to stifle giggles.
   The Principal made us welcome and then turned to face the window and apologised for the rubbish chute spoiling the view.
     Years on, and I still go hot and cold when I think about it.
     I said, "You can chute the drunks straight into the skip."
     Oh, the horror! The horror!
    The silence stretched. I staggered slightly. Zack said in a TV sort of voice "I'll get her coat!" and at last everyone laughed and Mrs. Principal fetched me a chair and the evening went on its cheery way.
    Later, Zack said "I'll see you again, Lauren or Lucy?"
   I had a post-it in my bag. I scrawled my extension in the Computing Department. He put a hand on my shoulder. "It's O.K, Lucy. Everyone was a bit . .  they won't remember in the morning."
   Maybe not. But I will never, ever, ever forget.

(My response to Tess Kincaid's prompt which you'll find with many others HERE)

Poetry Jam, 16th. July

Jessica Maybury at Poetry Jam very kindly offers two prompts this week - sleeplessness and peculiar dress. Perhaps these prompts can be rolled up into one?

Pavor Nocturnus

Age-freckled, stooped, thin as an altar rail
Miss Ellis mounts the stairs with mounting dread.
For solace - biscuits and a flask of tea.
She takes from her chest of coffin-black regret
her wedding gown, full skirted, its flowered train
grey from the night sweats and her nightmare tears,
loosens her once fair tresses and her stays,
stands at her mourning mirror and surveys
the heron legs, the unfrequented hair,
puts on the unwedded dress again, and mounts
the narrow bed sunk to her shape since girlhood,
lies back and waits, patient unwanted bride
waiting for sleep, or morning, or the one
who did not come, but still comes to the dreams
she loves and craves and loathes and wants and fears,
comes to her bedroom door, her bridegroom in
his tall grey hat, grey spats and silk cravat.
Her faithless dreamgroom with his scarecrow face
sidles up to her bed,  casts off his shoes
and mounts her, crooning some lascivious tune,
plucks at her husks of flesh and bears her down
into their paroxysm.
                                         The baleful moon
shines on this consumation, on this torment
salvaged from the shipwreck of her hopes.
Miss Ellis sleeps sounder now, her terrors fled
while the moon creeps westward past the lovers' bed.

Magpie Tales#72

From Willow Manor comes a picture prompt which sparks mixed memories.

Wheat Field with Rising Sun, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

End Of Term

  I lost my virginity in a wheatfield. It had been a summer of sticky weather. I was seventeen. I needed to satisfy my curiosity. Urges came a poor second as I remember, and we all go through phases of not knowing quite what we're doing or why, don't we? The thing about losing your virginity, it's not like losing your credit card. You can't apply for a replacement.  When I trailed home afterwards Mum asked  what had I been doing and why had I bits of straw stuck in my hair. I think she knew, but said nothing direct.

  The girls' school called him Tonka or Tonker, either was appropriate, but those were nicknames.   He was Jason.  He was a great rugby player. First fifteen captain and put together like a brick shed. He seemed ideal and some of the girls had been very direct about his attributes, things I'd seen only as anatomical drawings in the toilets, some - I couldn't help thinking - massively exaggerated. One such, in the gym toilet was titled "Tonker's plonker."  Nothing ventured, as they say, and it was near the end of term, so I asked if he'd like to walk me home via a scenic route.  

  He seemed quite well up on underclothes and told me a joke as he went about it. Imagine. On your back, knickers round one ankle, bra unhooked, and I'm wondering what's happening down there, not much except it hurts quite a bit and he's telling me a joke about this farmer who set one of the lads to harvest the wheatfield with the combine. It would take him most of the day. 

  Not so for Jason, who seemed to have finished and rolled off me and stared at the sky, saying sorry, Luce, you smell so nice. I didn't know what to think. I had felt almost nothing. I mean, nothing pleasant, nothing like I made myself feel sometimes after I got into bed.  To cover our embarrassment I asked him to finish the joke.

  "Well, the farmer was pleased, but wondered why there was a small square in the middle of the field where the combine hadn't cut the wheat."  He threw the limp condom away.

  "The driver said he wanted to leave that bit as a memento of the spot where he first made love."

  I wanted to say something about love, but fastened my bra instead.

  "The farmer thought that was quite sweet. Then he noticed another uncut patch in one corner of the field and asked was that where they did it again?"

   I steadied myself, hand on Jason's shoulder while I hitched up my knickers.

  "The driver said, no, that was where her mother was standing."  He tucked in his shirt and zipped his pants and we pulled on our school blazers.

   "The farmer said, you mean there you were humping away in the middle of the field with her mother watching from over by? Actually watching!"

   We started toward the lane and our homes.

   "What on earth did her mother say?"

  Jason opened the field gate for me. I said "Well, what did her mother say?"

  "Oh, her usual. Baaa! Baaa!" and then, quite gently, he laid his arm round my shoulders and just for a minute I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

   

  

MaffickMonday #3

This week Alicia wants to know what life would be like if "birds ruled the world"

Birds Rule, O.K?

They'd want to know which Squadron I would join.
"Choose from this catalogue but do not keep
our trigger-happy Flight Commanders waiting.
Note that there is a waiting-list to join
the Birds of Paradise. The State does not
do Paradise. You girls are all the same,
fancying your own fine feathers. All this
prinking and preening never made fine birds. "

I'd ask them not to rush me. How about
a lammergeier?  "A splendid choice," they'd say.
"You carry bones aloft and let them fall
like bombs to shatter on the rocks below.
Great sport, particularly if they were
the bones of some sworn Enemy of State.
You'd swoop and pick their scattered shards for marrow."

I'm spoilt for choice. A raptor seems ideal.
Something I can get my talons into,
rip singing birds to bits to feed my chicks.
Better the sparrow hawk than the wee sparrow
in aviaries where the strong prey on the weak.
That is the way in bird dictatorships
where eagles dare not gainsay parrot-speak
from the high branches where the cockateels
perch, laughable in their 'who's-a-pretty' plumes
with drivel squawking from their raucous beaks.

Maffick Monday, 27th.June

If There Were No Fear

If there were no fear I'd say "I love you,"
but fear I'd see amusement in your glance.
Or, telling you to music, hear you say
"You love the dancer, child, less than the dance."
When in the fearful rush of days we met
I don't remember, yet that day is still
locked fast in my heart's most secret chamber.
I love you, and I fear I always will.

Thanks to Alicia at MaffickingMonday with her prompt
"What if fear didn't exist?"

Magpie Tales#70

Tess Kincaid's photo prompt this week is a family portrait.

Julia

   My sister was born at home, on my birthday, when I was eight.  Gran came to stay even though Mum said she'd be alright, she'd manage, and when I came in from school Gran said "Well, Lucy. You have a little sister. Come and see." She took my hand and led me to the small bedroom that would be the nursery and we stood by the crib, looking down at the sleeping baby. I learned later, much later, that what I felt as I gazed at this mite, my eighth birthday present, my new sister, is called 'falling in love.' I knelt by the crib and stroked her baby hair and her tiny fingers and asked Gran what she was called and Gran said something so amazing I couldn't believe it. "Your Mum and Dad said because she came on your birthday and is a sort of twin, you can choose her name."

   So I asked could she be Julia, because there was a ballet dancer in my reading book called Julia, but a sister  was better than any dancer and Mum and Dad both said she would like her name and I wondered if I would ever tell her how she got it.
   Now when I look back, her early years telescope into a handful of memories. Her first word is "Oosy." She holds my two hands and I go from room to room, backwards, helping her toddle. We become "Jucier and Looly." Some nights at bedtime she brings Sydney, her toy panda and stands by my bed, meaning can she come in for a cuddle and we pretend we are poor waifs lost in a dark wood until Sydney rescues us and we fall asleep. She shows me how you wiggle a loose tooth and gives me the first when at last it comes out. Yes, I still have it. Mum says sometimes when I am at school she lies where the sunshine comes in through the bay-window in the afternoon, and moves round with it till I get home, and then we make lego towers or houses till tea is ready and I watch her hands, so careful, and see her concentration, and I gulp with love for her.

   When I was fourteen, nearly, I became a woman. I told her what was happening and how sometimes my tummy would hurt. She asked if this happened to Mum and Gran and was wide-eyed when I told her this happened to all women and then she forgot about it, as children will. She was nearly six. But she gave me Sydney. She was “too old for him now, Loola. He can keep your sore tummy warm.”

   She had her friends and I had my boyfriends and then all too soon, the same month she became her school’s triple-jump champion, she too became a woman. The school taught the mechanics. I told her about joy and yearning and heartbreak, how to be careful and that she could always talk to me, and then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, there she was, my bridesmaid, sixteen, poised and lovely, grown taller than me. I didn’t throw my bouquet. I gave it into her hands, Julia, my beautiful sister, and we began going our different ways.

   My marriage was four years old and less than I had hoped it would be when she visited one day and told me she had been pregnant but had miscarried at the first trimester and had things to tell me. She looked wrecked. She didn’t want tea, or a drink. I went to the bedroom and came back with Sydney, and she knew what I meant. We lay down. I held her and let her cry, and that’s when my husband came in. He called “Hi, Luce,” from the hall and Julia said “Oh, My God!” He came into the bedroom and looked at us on the bed, and began shouting about what he’d always known. How I thought more of my fucking sister than I did of him and how we were a pair of lezzas. I got all of what was wrong with me and with our marriage, while Julia hid her face and sobbed until I said “For God’s sake shut up, Zack! She’s just lost a pregnancy.” He just said “Julia?” and went very still.
   How could I not have known? Why did I not guess? She’d had things to tell me! Next thing I was screaming at them out of red caves of rage. I rolled off the bed, hauled my tall sister to her feet, called her a fucking bitch and punched her, punched my beloved Julia once, right where their baby had been, so she doubled over, retching. When they had gone I sat on the bed for hours, sometimes silent, sometimes wailing. Zack phoned first. I asked him not to come back. I was leaving him. I heard him begin to say something about Julia before I put the phone down. It was three days before Julia phoned. All she said was “Lucy, I betrayed you. But I’m not with Zack,” before I heard her phone go down.

   That was four years ago. She never writes, or calls. But several times a year, and always on our birthday, I get photographs by email. They are often mountain scenes; in the Cascades, Yosemite, the Chilean Andes. And recently, pictures of Save the Children projects in Africa, and at last, at last, one showing Julia, tanned and lean, wearing shorts and a big hat, reading to a group of rapt African kids. Love is a verb, not a noun. I email back – “Come home, Joo.” And her message says “In a while. How’s Sydney?” so that I cry, properly cry at last. It may be a little or a long while, but some day it will be the right day, when she truly feels she is forgiven as I now know she has forgiven me, and we are ready, both of us, to accept the other’s forgiveness, and can learn to be sisters again.

Magpie Tales#69

Tess at Willow Manor prompts writers this week with another picture . . 

The Sea Beneath Our Feet

  Heading for Tesco I saw twenty, thirty yards ahead, two guys, in yellow dayglo jackets, workmen. Each carried a slender metal pole, shiny,  shoulder height.  Every so often they would stop and rest the end of the pole on the pavement and . . this was the intriguing bit . . put their ear to the top end of the pole as if listening to something.        Who could resist finding out more?  I came up behind them, and as I got closer, saw that the poles had something like a very small tabla drum on the top end. And they weren't putting the end of their poles on the pavement, but down through the holes in the square metal lids that cover fire hydrants and stop-cocks. I guessed - they were listening for water leaks!  And I thought, "What a brilliantly simple idea!"

  "Excuse me!"

  He didn't hear me at first. "Excuse me! You're finding leaks in the water mains?"

  I figured he'd be only too keen to talk about his job, and when he'd shown me the resonator - the drum thing - and explained how you did a test, he handed me his pole. Oh WOW!  Now I'm a council water leak tester and all!

  "Like this?"  I poked the end into the next hydrant cover along the pavement. I felt it contact something hard.

  "That's the water main. You're close to the stop-cock. What d'you hear?"

  I put my ear to the top of the drum. 

  "Oh wow . . "

  "What you're hearing is the water running in the mains. It's like - "  He seemed to be waiting for me to say "It's like the sound you hear when you hold a sea-shell to your ear.  It sounds like the sea!"

  His mate came up and started jossing him. "Get run in for pickin' up in the street, Frank."

  Frank said, "Get down to the next hydrant, Les,  and do your party piece." And when Les moved off, Frank said, "Listen again . . ?"

  "Lucy" I said, and put my ear to the resonator again, and noticed that, ten yards off, Les seemed to be blowing onto his resonator, his hands cupped round it.

  "Oh my Goodness! Whale song! Coming through the pipes! And the sea sounds. But it's beautiful - rising and falling, so many different notes. How does he do it?"

  "It's a waterman's secret, Lucy.  On a good day the lads up at the pumping station say they can hear him." His face was mock serious. I grinned and handed him back his pole. "Thank you so much. By the way . . what does a leak sound like?"

  Frank just said "That's another secret. Must get on."

 And so I got on as well, to Tesco by way of slow grey rolling ocean wastes through which huge creatures moved with leisured grace, talking, piping, singing, courting each other in the seas beneath my feet.

Onestop Poetry - "Octains"

Luke Prater, hosting OSP this week, seeks poems in Octain form.

High Octane Highs

Once you poured Tigers in your tanks.
(A sixties ad. you may recall)
You floored the pedal! What a ball!
A bigger thrill than blinds-down w**ks,
that exhaust boom, that throaty vrooom,
those handbrake turns and wheel-spin pranks
hit three wee girls and killed them all -

Great stuff, those Tigers in your tanks.

Magpie Tales#66

Inspiration this week is found in the library at Willow Manor

Four Five One (*)

When you’ve a mind to burn some books, first, burn

Psocoptera, the bookworms. They can’t run.

For a brief while they suffer, then they pop.

Don’t stop there! Get a taste for burning things.

Turn to the readers. Those who don’t agree

that burning all improper books is good

you’ll make example of by immolation.

Hear how they fizz and crack and shrivel up,

fine punishment for blemished literacy.

Better still to stop the treason at its source.

Go for the writers. Make a bigger pyre.

Herd the public out to smell their smoke,

their shrieks more damning than the words they wrote

that you did not agree with. Don’t forget

what makes a book improper is in your gift.

College, seer and Cardinal only know

heresies. You have the supreme say-so.

Then fan the flames till what’s left on the shelf

is the mindless drivel that you wrote yourself.

(*) The temperature in degrees Fahrenheit at which paper ignites spontaneously.

See Ray Bradbury’s story “Fahrenheit 451”

Magpie Tales#63

Tess at Willow Manor has a psychedelic prompt for us this week to help keep our Muses alive and well

Bad Trip

  First I phoned the police and got put through to the Drugs unit. Then I phoned my tutor. Could he meet me? I named a bar in the West End. Not the usual students' watering hole. A bit posh.  He agreed like I thought he would.

  He was there when I got there and looked sniffy when I wanted only juice. The barman set it on the marble counter. Beautiful, Italian stuff, black mottled with pink veins. Very expensive. Very solid.

  "So how was the trip, Lucy?"

  "Isn't LSD old hat? I thought this was the E era?'

  "We have to start somewhere."  He's the sort that uses a beard to mask a warped mind.

  "My trip? Well, it started with coloured lights coming at me but never getting any closer, sort of curtains of shifting colours, like the Northern Lights. Too bright to look at but still there when you close your eyes. And spinning. When they stood still, I was spinning. I thought the lights were bad till the frogs started. I was nude and covered in frogs, all different colours. I could feel them, slithery. And they stared. It seemed to go on for hours. I freaked. I could feel myself screaming and pleading with them but couldn't hear anything. The biggest one got one of my hands in its mouth. I could feel my hand being crunched. I couldn't shake it off. Then the frogs turned to stars that burst into bits of coloured glass, swirling around and shifting. The bits chased me round my room."

  "Not unusual" he said. "Lights better than frogs, eh?"

  "You could say that, except as I began to come out of it, I found I really was undressed and I'd been dribbling everywhere because my period had started and I'd smashed up a lot of my stuff."

   "Sorry about that. Valuable stuff? PC?"

    His unconcern was monumental. Was he stoned?  

   "That was my trip. Thanks, Partyman.  You really sewed up my education for me."

   "You only graduate once, Luce!" 

    "You ever have hallucinations like that? Frogs eating you alive. Stars exploding at you. Your own blood dribbling down your legs? And just as a matter of interest - where are my clothes? And how did I get home?"

  "You were the star turn, Lucy!  Hal . . lucinations. Lucy nations. Like it! Froggy bits not nice, though" He made it sound as if it should have been nice, really. "Your trips will get better. With practise. I promise. You need something stronger. I've some lines of coke? In my office?"

  Some things are just too much.

  "Ever seen a marble counter close up?" I said

  "Pardon?"

  "I mean, really close up?"

  "I'm not following."

  I put my hand on the back of his neck and shoved his head down. When his nose hit the marble I said "That close!" and the barman said "Bloody hell, lady!'

  "He's seeing stars. And I'm going quietly."

  I said something about how feeding drugs to students might just cost him his job if the Red Tops got to hear about it. And then, "By the time you've wiped your tears away and shanked it back to your office, the drugs squad will be snorting . . sorry . . sorting their way through your stash."

  I walked back to my ransacked room, thinking maybe the dope hadn't worn off, 'cos I'd just shopped a university professor and given him a bartop kiss and my heart rate hadn't gone up a hairsbreadth.  Then I started laughing so much I had to sit on a garden wall for a bit, thinking, if he's a typical male he'll put it all down to the time of the month . . .

  

   

The Poetry Bus, 18th. April

Thanks to NanU for this week's prompt. Writing about explosions buys us our ticket - we hope.

Supernova

You need darkness on the surface of the deep

and God to turn the lights on, stir the waters.  

                                                              Or

a star that's eight times heavier than our Sun.

You need time. In God's hands, Mon to Saturday.

Sunday He rested, saw that it was good -  but

should God be proud of what God did, or does?

Our star needs aeons reckoned in billions

to fuse her hydrogen to helium, 

to carbon, oxygen, to iron, a vast

slow-burning bomb releasing heat that checks

the inexorable squeeze of Gravity -

till POP!  Her fuel runs out. Then Gravity begins

to win, to wind the star in on herself -

until the energy set free by Gravity

blows the covers off.  This takes three days, maybe.

This cataclysm makes the elements 

of all we are. The shock wave sweeps them,

piles them as new stars, new earths, new deeps.

All this is just as slow as God was quick.

You are Godmade. You are Stardust. Take your pick.

The Hubble telescope picture is of the so-called "Crab" nebula in the constellation Taurus.  It is the remains of a supernova which exploded in 1054. It is 6500 light years away. It is now 11 light years across  and is still expanding at about 1500 kilometers per second.  Our Sun is not massive enough to become a supernova. A probable supernova candidate in our Milky Way galaxy is Betelgeuse, one of the brighter stars in the constellation Orion.

Magpie Tales#62

Our hostess, Willow at Willow Manor serves up a hearty breakfast. A real Willow Pattern prompt!

  

Not The Full Picture!

  I sometimes stayed at my Grandma's on Saturday and she would fry eggs for my Sunday breakfast and put them on a blue and white plate she called her willow pattern. The plate had a picture and when she gave me my breakfast she said a poem that told the story of the picture. The eggs covered most of the picture and I would eat the eggs bit by bit so that the things in the picture showed through the cuts I made in the eggs. Then Grandma said, "Don't pick at your breakfast, child!" because how was she to know what I was doing?  I had to remember the picture and the poem, and I had to make my cut-outs in the right order, and after a few breakfasts at Grandma's I got quite good at it. One Sunday I asked her could I have the little pointy knife she called her fruit knife.

  "Goodness, Lucy! What for?"

  "To make smaller holes. Please Gran?" All I wanted was to cut closer to the outlines of the birds, the little ship, the men on the bridge, the willow tree. It wasn't as if I didn't eat the cut out bits. I ate one piece while I worked out where the next hole had to be. Grandma made lovely fried eggs, just fried enough so the yolk wasn't so runny it filled up the holes. If it did I mopped it up with bits of toast so I could see the picture properly.

  Grandma frowned but gave me the knife from her knife drawer and went away to the telephone and when she came back, my eggs looked like a lace hankie with the fence and the apple tree and the temple and everything showing through. Then I ate the egg hankie and the toast and asked Gran what an eating disorder was.

  "I heard you on the phone talking about an eating disorder or something. That was a nice breakfast, Gran."

  "I'm happy to see you finished it. At last."

   After that, Grandma didn't always make fried eggs. Sometimes it was just cornflakes, or sausage and tomatoes on a white plate and all you can do with sausage is eat a little tiddy piece from one end and then a tiddy piece from the other till you get to the middle bit and eat that and that's not much fun, and I could do that at home anyway. When I asked Mum if we could get a plate with the willow pattern for fried eggs she said they were too expensive and too many fried eggs gave you colseterol or something so I put on my sulking face for a bit, which I would never do at Grandma's. Mum wouldn't tell me about eating disorder either and I didn't tell her about cutting holes in the eggs to show the picture.

  But I never forgot Grandma's little poem.

Magpie Tales#61

Tess at WIllow Manor invites writers to join her for drinks with this week's picture prompt.

He had been hitting on me all through lunch. And leering, only he wouldn't see it as leering, nach. You meet them all over, slightly obese, slightly sweaty, massively overpaid, superficially married. Always telling you about their nought to sixty go-faster motor or how they get complimentaries for Wimbledon. And now, here he is, thinking, "I've got something she wants." (A job on offer) "She's got something I want." (Guess. Go on, guess). I'm thinking, "No, Tubs, this is not what's meant by Human Resource Management."
  By the time the waiter trundles the dessert cart to the table and he orders the chocolate cheesecake, he's pretending he doesn't realize he's pressing my little tiddy toes not so gently under his hoof. I suppose the wine has made him feel bold, confident and in charge.
  "So," he says, through cheesecake, "What about it?" A double-entendre that goes echoing round the restaurant. I lean towards him, and arch my toes under the hoof. And wiggle them. And lower my voice a little. "What about what? And when about what?" His face changes to "She's mine! She's mine!"
 "The arrangement sounds O.K to me. I'd have hoped for a higher salary." Very straight face.
 "We'll see what we can do. It's up to the Board, you realize? Now . . when can we - ", he pauses " - or rather, when can you start?"
  I pick up my glass, and incline it towards the bottle. "Let's start with dwinkies."
 "Why not?" He fills my glass, then his. This empties the bottle. The way he tips it up means "Shall we get another?"
 "Why not?"
 He twists round in  his chair, looking for the waiter. When he turns back to me I have balanced my glass on the backs of my left hand fingers, a few inches above the table, palm down.  He looks puzzled. My glass is perfectly steady
 "It's a test for tremor. To see if you're athetoid. Or have a tendency to Parkinsons. Try it. Go on." I make winsome faces and pick up his glass with my other hand. He holds out his left hand. I place his glass on his fingers, and there we are, the two of us, playing itty-bitty lovers' games, left hands flat, wine glasses balanced.
 "You have nice, steady hands," I say, adding a little "Mmm!" as I touch the tips of his fingers. Now he will do anything for me. So when I say, "Let's test your other hand," he holds it out at once.
  I take my glass from my left hand and place it on his right. So now he has  brimming full glasses of red wine balanced on the backs of both hands. Get the picture?
  "Manage your slimy way out of that! Let the wine flow free!"
  He says "Wha . . what?" He doesn't get it yet.
  I get up, unsling my bag from the back of my chair, sling it on my shoulder.
  "Stick your job. Overweight little creep. Bye Bye."
  I leave him shouting after me. So what. I've been called a bitch before.

We earn our tickets on the Poetry Bus this week by using Danabug's
prompt as the first line/phrase of a poem . . . 


Domestic Math


I am a crooked line. No doubt there is

a complex function linking me to you

that perfectly reflects my crookedness.

And that's always the trouble, isn't it?

Math leaves no room for any imperfection.

So. Given 'X' we will always find 'Y' 

defined with such precision as we choose.

I am your complex, silly, crooked X.

and all my defeX you've evaluated

so you'll come out just perfect - that's math's way.

I daren't complain 'Y won't you wash the dishes?

Y leave your dirty washing on the floor?

Y do you often fart and always snore?

Y must you shout an swear and slam the door?

Your so. So Y! I can't stand you any more.'

Magpie Tales#60

Another evocative picture for this week's Magpie Tales from Tess at Willow Manor  . . . where you can read many other responses.

STREET SCENE

The inquest found that the motorcyclist was not to blame.

The rainspots on the visor seemed not right, what with all the blood.  The bike had veered to avoid the usual child-running-into-the-road. But at the wrong, wrong moment the driver of a van, double-parked, had swung a rear door open. It struck the bike, not hard, but hard enough. The bike veered again, mounted the kerb, beyond control now. The biker wrestled it but I could see it was hopeless. The front wheel hit the shop front, under the window. The biker came over the handlebar and through the window. Head first. The window came down in a cascade of glass. The assistant - I remember his white trilby - had just wrapped my square sausage and pork chops. He managed "Jeez!" and raised an arm. He was lucky.  I was lucky. The woman next to me . . dear God, you don't last long with a slice of glass in your neck. Blood pumped out in great spurts. Even if there's anything you could do there's no time. I stood, pissing my knickers while she gurgled "Somebody help me" before she fell.  The biker ended up on the display slabs just inside the window, in a heap of leathers and boots and smashed  trays with beef cuts and link sausages and lambs' liver.  I can't remember much about what happened next but when I got outside there were folk milling round and gawping, and pretty soon sirens, and beat cops keeping folk back. The bike lay on the pavement. The biker had crawled out of the shattered window and seemed okay and was sitting on the pavement against the shop's front wall where the bike had hit, every limb shaking. I crouched down close by.  Bits of mince or something stuck to the leathers. I brushed them off, thinking "How pathetic is that?"

    "Take your helmet off. Get more air."  The black, rain spattered plexiglass wasn't even cracked. You wonder - you can't see in, how do they see out? I said, "I saw it all. I was in the shop. I'll witness." What's the point of saying "You weren't going fast. Didn't look like your fault." An ambulance was drawing up. Paramedics came over. I said, "I think we're O.K. In the shop." They crunched over broken glass. Blood was trickling across the shop step. The biker had taken the helmet off. A girl! Close cropped fair hair. My age for a guess. So shocked even her jaw was shaking.  I don't know what you do for shock. I put an arm round her. 

   And d'you know what she kept saying, over and over?  I mean, this would be insanely funny except that there was a woman lying bleeding to death in a wrecked butcher shop. She kept saying "But I'm vegetarian. I've always been a vegetarian."

   The paramedics came out of the shop. What was on the stretcher was completely covered and they were not hurrying.