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.