DOLL HOUSE

The lifeless porcelain face shone through plastic under harsh fluorescent lights. The eyes seemed to follow you.

She hadn’t even wanted to be brought here. She was more interested in the boys’ aisle. With trucks and guns and loud banging, bleeping, blooping noises that sounded like hours of endless fun. 

But to please her mother, here they were looking at dolls. Her mother said little girls who play with dolls turn out to be proper ladies. She thought that was stupid.

She thought everything on this aisle was stupid, until she saw it.

It was wondrous. Stood out on its own, as big as her it was. Snow white walls with a brown wooden roof. Tiny glass windows looked in upon tiny furniture, tiny tables with tinier cutlery on top. A tiny grandfather clock and a tiny four poster bed. She had never seen anything like it! She felt as though she should be small enough to fit inside it. The world felt too big for her sometimes, and after all wouldn’t that make sense? Wasn’t she just like her mother’s doll? To be taken out and played with and shown off and primped and preened whenever there were visitors round for afternoon tea.  

At least if she fitted in this house, she would have somewhere of her own to go when her mother got bored with her. She thought it would be only right for her to have her own little house for her own little dolly self!

But her mother called her away. She said nothing. She never did, children should be seen and not heard after all. A few minutes later, she left the toy shop with the creepy porcelain doll under her arm, and the tiny little grandfather clock, secreted away in her secret pocket of her dress and an even more secret smile on her face. 

EDGE

She took the last train back home through the pink evening light.

She had been alone for far too long, she knew she needed respite.

Solace in the form of too much noise and an over compensating mother who brought hot tea in giant, cracked old mugs, even on scorching summer days like today.

She had been missing, Lost in the mire of adulthood and responsibility, teetering too close to the edge, so it was time to go home, time to regroup, to burst into flames like a phoenix, and have her rebirth aided by homemade dinners and jam tarts. It’s funny how you always have to go back the beginning to make a new start. 

SILENCE

It takes everything I have in me not to bolt. Not to turn on my prissy five inch heels and run. But I made a promise to someone, so here I am, in the dead of the night, waiting for a man.

I scrub up well, in heels, sheer black stockings and a slinky black and red number, just below thigh high, the top half, cut low enough to emphasise my ample cleavage, but high enough to leave just enough to the imagination.

I know how to work what I’ve got, but I’m no ones whore. At least, not usually.

I hear the street lights buzzing with that electric hum that fills up the night in every back street, of every city, in every town, on this whole rotten, spinning pile. A low dull buzzing and an orange glow. It could be anywhere. Could be, but it’s not.

The sound of heavy footsteps breaks my reverie and I am snapped abruptly back to the here and now. “Are you waiting for someone?” the voice is deep and thick, syrupy, but harsh, it cut through the night like cold steel.  Every inch of me begins to tremble, my skin, crawling at the baritone of each syllable.

Without turning around I nod into the darkness. Silence wraps itself around my tongue and mutes me. He takes my hand, turns me around and leads me back the way I came. Our soft foot falls echoing in unison through the dark damp alleyway as I fall into step beside him.

Keeping up with him, keeping my mouth shut for him, keeping my promise. I always keep a promise. 

BRASS

It was those heavy brass fire bellows that she saw every time she closed her eyes. Ornate patterns engraved into both sides, the squeak of the leather as her grandfather put them to the glowing embers of the coal fire and squeezed.  She remembered how the red coal would glow to a bright orange as he did, his thick tobacco stained fingers clasping the handles of the bellows.

Then he’d stand up, dust off his grey slacks, (always grey slacks), and say “it’s no use love, we need another few pieces of coal on it”

This was her only memory of him. Her only clear one anyway. There were snippets of other things, a distant song with unclear words and a muddled melody, thick horn rimmed glasses and a tattooed forearm, sinewy with old hardened muscles. The ink of the tattoo long faded to a bluish colour, the ink, bleeding and running and mingling with his own veins, that arm looked like blue stilton cheese, she used to think.

Those were the only things she knew of him. That and a deep regret at not coming back before now. Now there were only those memories. There would be no more.

She cursed her mother for leaving with her all those years ago, as she sat in an unfamiliar sitting room, staring blankly at an unfamiliar grandmother, desperately trying to think of the appropriate responses that a granddaughter should give at a time like this.

As she sat there, in this awkward, thick, sad, silence, her grandmother began to sob, deep gulping sobs, while she looked at her, as if imploring her to do something, to act, to say something even, say anything, anything at all.

But words wouldn’t come. So she did the first thing that came to her, and got down on her knees, knelt beside the dying fire, took the old bellows in her hands, and began to squeeze.  

BEYOND THE WATER LINE

Have you ever looked down on yourself in a swimming pool? Or even the bath? It looks like you’ve been split in two. The water carves you in half where it meets your flesh, displacing you slightly. Leaving you out of whack. That’s how your face looked that day when I looked at you. When you said those words, I felt like you had been broken somehow. Like everything I had ever known about you was suddenly cleaved in two, leaving me looking from fractured piece to fractured piece desperately seeking out the truth between.

Now I can’t picture you without seeing you dismembered.

Maybe that’s a reflection on the white hot anger I feel when I think of you. Or maybe it’s just because that’s how you looked. Maybe that’s always how you looked, but I had been submerged in your watery lies. To me, you always looked whole. 

MUTE

VisDare challenge word was 'Pensive'

MUTE

‘For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood’.

Vacant or pensive, vacant or pensive. Her head was full of words how could that be vacant? But she thought of nothing in particular, how could that be pensive?

She was full of language and phrases by other people who could put them together. She read them. Devoured them. Took them in as water, assimilated into her flesh.

She longed for the ability to tell her own story. But stuck in mute silence she would never be the next Wordsworth, this she knew.

She flicked her eyes sideways. Left for yes. Right for no, the nurse turned the page, 

‘Pegasus, by Patrick Kavanagh’ she liked this one.

It was about flights of the soul, and being outside yourself.

How cruel to have the heart of poet, trapped inside a broken body with these great immovable hands.

VisDare word is Obscured

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES.

He blew smoke right at my face through his teeth. Jaundiced, blood shot eyes stayed fixed on mine. ‘That’s the price of it sweetheart, eventually your soul weighs out and before you know it you’ve got thick yellow leather where your skin used to be.’

He handed me the small, clear plastic bag, his gaze never faltering.

My hands were slick with sweat, so much so that I thought the bag was going to slide right though my fingers. Sometimes now I wish it had, sometimes I catch a glimpse of what’s left of me in a mirror, and I really truly wish it had.

‘Well, you gonna open it doll?’ As I opened the  baggy, he blew more smoke from between those thick liver  lips of his, obscuring my view of the substance held within.  I wish it had stayed that way forever, out of focus, just like me.   

Vis Dare challenge. Word this week was Bruised

MUNCHAUSEN

She stared blankly ahead as doctors shone torches into her eyes and poked and prodded at her bruised skin. She hated this part, too many questions.

She had no explanation for it, but she felt too big for the life that she had chosen.

Handling her emotions, all of them (there were so many) had never been her strong suit, so she began wearing them on her flesh, like badges of honour, or shame, she wasn’t sure which.

She knew what they thought ‘battered wife’, but they were wrong. ‘Just battered’ she laughed to herself while she tried to hide the marks on her knuckles.

What would they do if they knew? If they ever suspected that her elusive abuser didn’t exist. At least, not in any form that they ever imagined.

She sat on her hands, winced from the pain, and smiled. 

This weeks VisDare challenge was engraved. Heres my entry.

ARE YE DANCIN’?

With the first beat of the song he was transported back 60 years. To the first moment he met her. He had asked her to dance to this very song. He whirled her around the dance floor joyously, then he kissed her. Full on the lips in front of everyone. A bold  move in 1950’s Ireland.

‘God I miss ye Mary’ he thought, tears began to streak the deep set wrinkles on his face. He cried silently on his bar stool, while the other patrons threw sideways glances at him and moved slowly away.

‘Ah’, he thought, ‘they don’t know, they can’t, too young, I was young once too, she made me young.’ He grabbed a young man by the arm, and shouted ‘she’s etched on my skin, engraved into my heart!’

He turned around, settled back down and sipped his Guinness. ‘God I miss ye Mary’ he thought. 

DECLINE

Everything she used to be is threaded through the lines in her face. Good thing too because her eyes have nothing left in them. A woman of such character, how colourful she was. How heavily the mighty fall.

Do you know how hard it is to watch one of your heroes disintegrate? I’ll tell you, it’s damn hard. To see the sparks of intelligence and humour, all glints of mischievousness and recognition held in her eyes be replaced by fear and confusion? It takes a part of you.

Feeling someone else’s end approach engulfs you slightly. Panic rises in your cheeks as you feel tears swelling and bubbling up and it’s all you can do to push them back down because you know, you know, one wrong move from you means a series of cataclysmic events for her and you only have 40 minutes left with her. Hospital visiting hours are remorseless.

Once upon a time she was a whole universe unto herself. At the heart of it stood her heart, with the rest of us orbiting and spinning around her. I guess we still do, it’s just that now her light has burnt out. I miss her light. I miss her stories. I miss her songs. I miss the fact that she insisted on putting on a full face of makeup even just to go to the local shop, leaving 7 year old me dangling and swinging my legs impatiently off the side of her bed as I watched her don her war paint. I miss the way her skin smelled when she hugged me and the way her brushed linen bed sheets felt at night.

It’s strange to wait for the end of something that you never saw the beginning of, and only knew less than half of. Especially when that fraction of knowledge takes up an entire chunk of your own world.

Now a whole person is missing. How can that happen?

The only thing I have to take solace in now is that everything she was to me, all her songs and stories and love and care is etched onto my heart and laced through my blood.

Write4ten, Word inspiration was 'Yes'

THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE

Yes. She said yes a lot. ‘Mam’ they would scream. ‘Yes’ she would answer. ‘Can we…?, will you…?, can you find…?, will you make…?can I have…?’ . Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes to everything. Sometimes she wanted to stand on top of the kitchen table banging pots together and scream ‘NO’ at the top of her voice. Sometimes just picturing their shocked little faces should she ever build up the courage to actually do that got her through the tougher parts of her day. Parts where she was wrist deep in greenish yellow baby poop, with a kicking infant peeing on her while ‘In The Night Garden’ blasted from the sitting room at deafening decibels as her other two little angles punched, kicked and bit their way through the morning.

This was not what she signed up for. She just would never have imagined that seven years on from their magical first date, they would have a brood of children, (her first thought there had been horrible little monsters), he would be losing all the hair on his head only to find it again on his shoulders, back, neck and stomach, and she would be leaving unholy amounts of dandruff on her pillow every morning and be suffering from mild, yet highly embarrassing and inconvenient bladder problems as a result of giving birth to twins with abnormally large heads.

No, this really isn’t what she signed up for.

But all the same she loves them. At least she supposes she loves them although she is not quite sure if it’s out of a sense of duty or if she really truly from the heart loves them. Either way she’s stuck with them now.

‘oh you’re so lucky!’ her single friends bleat at her with their perfectly coiffured hair, flawless make up (actual make up, not the marker her five year old found in her handbag and decided to put on her as lipstick), size ten jeans, and highly impractical nails. Yea, sure.

But no she knew she had everything that most women her age desired, craved even. The problem was that she had never desired or craved this sort of life. In fact she used to loathe it. She  used to think that women who settled for this sort of life were beneath her somehow, that she would never fall into the trap of mainstream misogynistic patriarchy by settling down and having children while the man of the house went out to work and the wee wife stayed at home to keep house. Yet here she was. She resented herself for giving in to societal norms. Where was the fire in her belly gone? Where was her passion gone? Where was she gone?

A clattering sound from the kitchen broke her reverie, ‘MAAAAAAAM!!!’ hellish screeching met her ears and a red squinted face, tear streaked and sniffling peeked round the door at her.

‘Yes love, mammy’s coming.’

Five Sentence Fiction, word inspiration this week is 'Blades'

http://lilliemcferrin.com/five-sentence-fiction-blades/

SEED

There was nothing even remotely seductive about it, but she let his thick clumsy fingers continue their exploration of her cold, dry, rigid body despite her boredom.

After all, it was what she did best, from the bedroom to the boardroom she allowed people (men for the most part), to pull, and prod, and poke, and fondle her ineptly.

She was numb to the plights of her femininity at this point, which is why she was glad to have something to focus on as this, latest in a long line of patriarchal mistakes, sweated onto her forehead.

A pure white  lily, surrounded by three tall blades of grass stood, protruding from a black ceramic vase, in the corner of the room, and this is where her gaze lay as huffed and puffed and pumped her full of emptiness.

He left the room hastily, zipping up his trousers and gripping his tie in his hand, he said nothing, not even thanks, she lay for a moment and stared at the ceiling, then she wiped his seed from her thigh using the tousled bed sheet, stood up, fixed her skirt and hair, plucked a blade of grass from the vase, and left the room too. 

Five sentence fiction, Word inspiration is Desolaion.

GOGGLE BOX

‘This revolution will be televised’, heavily accented, crackling over the tannoys.

We huddled in corners with our hands over our ears waiting for the blue lights to wash over us.

‘We feed you through the opiate of the masses, get high on your new found freedom’, but   we’re all still slaves in one way or another.

The harsh blue glare gets brighter as it meets the rest of the searchlights in the sky. There’s nothing left down here, nothing but human heads with square eyes and static skin.

New piece for VisDare

Word is Precarious.

Tête Dans Les Nuages

The documentary was about a man. He was French.  For some reason that sat well with her.

He was to walk from the roof of one high-rise to another, on the thinnest rope, with no harness or anything tethering him to the real world.

Just him, touching the sky.

He looked so free up there, so serene with nothing holding him onto the planet except his own two feet.

He fell to his death, his fall looked beautiful.

This too, sat well with her.

‘Amore e morte’ she said aloud, filled with a sudden sense of clarity, climbing the stairs to the roof of the building.  

***

As she walked out to stare upwards at the spectacle on the roof, she thought, ‘I should never have let her watch that documentary’.

‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds’ she whispered as she watched her daughter plummet towards the earth.

Performance piece written fo National Coming Out Day competition

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VisDare 24: Mastermind 150 word count fiction

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS – Aoife Read

Feverish. Staring at the second hand, waiting for the boom.

Count down to oblivion, that’s what this is.

It’s like they replaced his eyeballs with glass marbles ever since he heard it on the news.

The clock looms.

 10, 9, 8, 7, 6…

He can’t bear it.

His skin feels like roaches, crawling through epithelial cells, flooding his cracks and crevices .

He has become a man made of bugs, and cogs, and wheels and gears and tiny shards of metal.

‘Shrapnel Face’ he giggles to himself.

He feels like the narrator in ‘A Tell Tale Heart’.

Time buzzes out of control.

The second hand grinds to a halt.

Every hair on his body stands on end, his muscles sinewy and bulging.

He pierces the thick silence as he screams, ‘tear up the planks- here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!’

…5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Five Sentence Fiction, 'Home'

Each week, Lillie McFerrin posts a one word inspiration on her site and asks readers to submit a 'five sentence' piece of fiction. This is my first attempt at one of her themes. This week her theme was 'home' 

Below is a link to her site. 

 http://lilliemcferrin.com/five-sentence-fiction-home/

ON THE BUSES

Cackled and coughed through tobacco stained gums, he wheezes at me ‘The old hag at home wants to jump my bones’. The lines on his face creating an ordinance survey of a life less lived.

Buses are peculiar places, like a journey on the way to a journey.

I inhale their sentiment thick bleating’s, and exhale petrol heavy breath.

‘I’m coming love’ I think, and close my eyes to smell her scent and watch her lips move as she speaks, ‘I’m nearly there’. 

BOOM!

I steel myself

Against the ice bright,

Day-Glo war machine

That marches

Relentless through my head.

Batten down the hatches.

I send forth my firing squad,

My battalion on the front lines.

Loosed in the maelstrom

Lost in the mire.

I’m quaking in my boots

As the ground

Shakes in tremors

Beneath my feet.

1,2,3,4 BOOM!

An explosion of sound

And colour perforates my eardrums.

1,2,3,4 BOOM!

Shrapnel pierces my flesh

And I go down

Out for the count.

Now count me in,

As I come to,

1,2,3,4 Boom!

Sometimes I lose my battles,

But my war is almost won. 

INERTIA

I was stasis

Solidified blood

Unguent and thick

I was raw

Chapped skin

Red and weeping

I wept all over

Outside and in

From my eyes ,

My skin

My hair and bones.

I was sorrow

Down to my marrow

I was the bulging blue varicose vein

Snaking its way through

Legs of milky white glass

I was inertia

Resistant against the gravitational pull.

I didn’t go down,

I didn’t go anywhere.

Static, stoic, wounded

Inert and weeping.

Now here I go,

Once more into the fray.

STUFFED

Through various poses
Through various stages
Through tears and tantrums and doubts.
Through joyous occasions
Through loneliest heartaches
Through sickness, despair and let downs.
Through various cities
Through various time zones
Through innocence, altered and greyed.
Through sleeplessness spent at the edges of reason,
Through moments of violence and rage.
Through exquisite touches
Through tender encounters
Through timelessness, through all the pain
Through happy and sad,
We are fixed to give calm
And comfort with our open arms.
We smell of her youth,
We hold all her secrets
Locked safely inside our stuffed hearts.
Inanimate playthings
With fur on the outside
We are strong
We are solid
We are soft
Throughout all these years
She has cuddled our safety
We are teddy
We are bear
We are stuffed.