Scribbles

Due Date: 3/5/23 Prompt Genre: TBC It has been a long day. I was hoping for a short night. Anna and I have been fighting again, we never seem to stop. She had accused me of not listening. I had accused her of selfishness, of being a liar. Her retort had been that I have the emotional range of a robot. She was wrong. She always was. Not for lack of trying on her part, but Anna was a dirty fighter and an even dirtier human being. When we fought, she did not hold back using everything I had ever shared with her in a cocktail of hurt that brought up every single one of my past traumas. That was my fault. Anna was my best friend and I told her everything. Everything about my family, my friends, work. Once I started I could not stop.  My period started when I turned fifteen, the year I met Anna. She had transferred to our school. Telling everyone that her family had been killed in a car accident. Their Range Rover wrapped around a eucalyptus tree like a macabre piece of origami. She had ...

Due Date: 21/2/23  Beau’s Choice Genre: TBC The story of the dragon began as most stories did, on the lips of my grandfather as he smacked his thin lips, sliding his rather long pink tongue out and into the succulent flesh of the mango. He hadn’t taken his eyes off it. Working his way slowly from the tip to the fattened sides, first he took a large bite to rip it open, then he placed his mouth in a suction and sucked as lustfully and as hard as he could. This worked best with overripe mangoes. It saved him the trouble of having to bite into the mango and making a mess. He had told me when first I had brought him mama’s black dish filled to the brim with the first mangoes of the season. Mangoes were precious to grandfather and me. We would spend a long moment picking just the right one and as we worked through fruit after fruit grandfather would patiently answer my every question, something that would have been impossible anywhere else.  Not in the early morning while he tended...

  14/2/23  The Story of My Childhood  Kim’s choice Genre: Genre Switch  The sun hung loose in the sky, it could have been midday or late afternoon. It was hard to tell when the sun never set. Instead, it dangled in the bright sky, so loose and flimsy that my mother worried it would fall to the earth all of a sudden, leaving us in total darkness. Not that that could ever happen. Not now anyway, Sekuru Jo had long ago secured the sun with, if you cared to listen to him, ‘nothing but his wits and good looks’ or if you listened to my father, tricks and lies, for he had bargained with the sun and won. For 600 days the sun would neither rise, nor set. Instead, it would hang midair, halfway between setting and rising. Mother was one of those people that considered the worst thing and turned it to reality. Take the time she convinced us, Maidei and me. That I had a pair of horns growing out of my chest and proceeded to strap my chest down in layers of white linen. For days a...

  6/2/23 The Story of My Childhood Ari’s pick Genre: Freelance Had I known how naked I would be I would have driven to your house, hurled the door open, and stripped myself of all my clothing. It would not matter how many people were about. I would bare my breasts, my tiger-clawed stomach, and the excesses of my bottom to your world. My worn grey knickers ripped in the places that matter. That is what speaking about my childhood feels like. All my parts are wide open for my examination, then yours.  I should start by saying that my brain refused to cooperate, It occurred to me that to start, truly start I should start at the beginning. Not the night I came mewling into the world into the arms of a girl not yet ready to be a mother, forced to mature by her circumstance. The romance of her situation was dead as she stared into my scowling face, features withered and worn from writhing through her birth canal, barely making it alive into a world I must have asked to see for why e...

  Waiting (Pt. 1) For a long time, we only had the veranda. When the sun rose, we would polish it, and when we were younger, my mother would polish it. She always woke up earlier than my sister and me, and by the time the sun was high in the sky, the veranda would gleam. Dazzling with a silvery glare. We would sit on the edge, drinking tea, having lunch, or watch the neighbours go by. Sometimes we would watch the peddlers sell their wares, " Bhodhoro zai! Bhodhoro puti!" But we were not allowed to sit, but merely perch on the edge, for fear it would undo all of my mother's hard work. I perched on it when I waited for the boy from down the way. The boy with the broad shoulders, tapered waist, and white shining teeth. He lived five, six, seven houses down and made me wait. For a glimpse of him as he came back from school, as he came back home from boarding school, from the university. Made me wait to see him, but most of all to grow up from when I was seven to the day I t...

  Auntie grew up in a far-off communal land, the youngest in her family. Her parents were past their fifties when she was born. Old and past the age of chasing after a newborn and changing napkins. The moment she arrived, her mother passed her on to her older sister, Chido, who was twenty at the time and ready to start her own family.  Save for the occasional drop-ins to breastfeed her child, her mother remained a distant stranger whose sustenance flowed full and rich into Auntie’s eagerly suckling mouth. Auntie was a pitiful looking child always hungry. Hungry for her mother’s milk, for her visits were few and far in between, hungry for a mother she never truly knew. A mother who until the day she died remained a stranger a mother she never knew. At the time of her death, she had been dead to Auntie for a while. She had been dead for twenty-two years exactly.   To Mai Chido, the day Auntie was born was as far as she was concerned, an unburdening. It was not that she did ...