Scribbles

  December Due Date: 31/3/23 Genre: TBC I When she woke up the silence was gone, replaced instead by loud pulsing noises. They travelled through the walls and hit her squarely between the eyes. She blinked. One blink at time she though. Each  a deliberate act of manifestation as she wished the sounds away. The same deliberation she had had last night as she had peeled off each item of clothing from her body. First to go was the t-shirt her mother had given her in one of those acts of generosity that her mother was wont to have. The acts were not commonplace, no her everyday acts of were reserved for her grandkids. There was barely ever anything left for the mothers of those children. “Oh, take this.” It wasn’t a request. The Oh delivered in a flat insistence that brooked no argument. Not that she would have said no. That would have led to an argument. An argument she would surely lose. For what could she say? That her mother’s clothes had no place on her body? Or perhaps she w...

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...