Drabblewrimo 2022

[sojourner]

INDIFFERENCE

Honestly? He wasn’t bothered. Couldn’t care less. Let them do it, the silly fools. See where it gets them. A moment of what - pleasure, a weird kind of twisted fun? Subversion? And for what? Some sick sense of justice and equality? Pathetic.

They won’t see it through anyway. Just trying to frighten him into giving it all up.

They offered him a cigarette. Can you imagine?

“Ready”

Okay, this is beyond a joke now.

“Aim”

Are they actually going to...?

“Fire!”

The soldiers turned away, indifferent to the punctured bloody mass that had been the last King of England.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Indifference:

He says quietly, without preamble, “How was your weekend?” She’s used to seeing his eyes wrinkled with laughter, but now they attempt several layers of meaning: desperation, accusation, fear, violation. Urgent eyes.

“I asked you to stop speaking to me”, she says slowly.

“Do you know why I ask?”

“I don’t care”, she says, drawing the final word out with her exhalation as she closes her eyes and leans into a stretch, her spine making a soft but audible crack. She opens her eyes and looks into his. Her gaze becomes misty, not with sadness but with distance. Something receding.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Blast:

At the moment when the lit match drops into the kerosene, I, arsonist, meet your eyes, laughing into the flames, glittering, shameless: I made it for burning. In these days of long shadows, all illumination is a gift, I promise you. I get so tired of the angle of this distant winter light.

Others plant crisscrossing dynamite trails silently, a delicate lacework of clandestine intent made beautiful by the mystery of when it will catch, or whether it will burn all the way to the edge. The light of the explosion, their violent, guilty climax, leaves them twitching and empty.

 

[sojourner]

BLAST

Scraping and cleaning the walls, doors, ceilings and floors, I mused on the meaning of life.

Was it to realize one's potential and ideals? To evolve, or achieve biological perfection? To seek wisdom and knowledge, do good or the right thing? Or was it to love, to enjoy the act of living and connect with other humans?

I was certain of one thing in amongst the ideals and abstractions. The meaning of life definitely wasn’t to be found in a faulty homemade explosive, nor was it in the scraping and cleaning of accidental flesh from walls, doors, ceilings and floors.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Not to be totally nerdy about it, but I edited it.

Some plant crisscrossing dynamite trails silently, a delicate lacework of clandestine intent made beautiful by the mystery of when it will catch, or whether it will burn all the way to the edge. The light of the explosion, the violent, guilty climax, leaves them twitching.

But at the moment when my lit match drops into the kerosene, I meet your eyes, laughing, glittering and shameless, and gesturing at the flames. I made it for burning. In days of long shadows, all illumination is a gift, I promise you. I get so tired of the angle of this distant winter light.

 

[sojourner]

Yes, better to end it with that

 

[May Kasahara]

BLAST

He used an accelerant, the police report will say. But right now, they can only ask her to what's left of her face: "How did it happen?"

They mean the blast: brick and plasterboard hurling outwards like something trying to live, the seismic groan chanting down ceilings to floors, doors to dead ends, ashes to dust. But where did it start, really? A smile inviting her in, a razor hiding in plain sight, waiting to whittle her to nothing as soon as he got her alone. You belong to me.

They tell her about the kids. The fall feels forever.

 

[sojourner]

Oh god May Kasahara , that's incredibly hard-hitting. Traumatic. Well done.

 

[sojourner]

CAPTAIN

The war between skin and bone had existed ever since the one had covered up the other. Skin saw itself as protector. Bone festered, resenting being oppressed by this flimsy conceit.

And so it began. First one rib, then another, until all snapped free of their constraint. Skull followed suit, splitting through scalp with a whiplash. The skeleton emerged.

Skin cried out, fell useless to the floor. Bone stood proud in victory, “I am the true captain of this vessel!”

But without skin, bone dried, crumbled, fell to dust.

Unity lost to ego. Again.

Must this always be The End?

 

[May Kasahara]

Oh god May Kasahara , that's incredibly hard-hitting. Traumatic. Well done.

Thanks...quite ambivalent about this one, both in terms of quality and because it feels a bit exploitative. Definitely needs work, and was work, whereas the others have just poured out of me with no effort

 

[sojourner]

Thanks...quite ambivalent about this one, both in terms of quality and because it feels a bit exploitative. Definitely needs work, and was work, whereas the others have just poured out of me with no effort

Exploitative? Don't fall for the 'misery porn' shite mate. Stuff like this happens all the time. Why shouldn't you write about it?

Some take more work than others. Some days I struggle to come up with anything at all.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Captain

I embarked still believing that my adult life was an exercise in going straight, each step an apologetic denial of the girl who had once sparkled in storms. It was not my first time in the water: I had taken to the seas before, commanding a small yacht, keeping land in sight. I thought those were adventures.

I became intoxicated by the hot salt air and that dizzying, directionless feeling, trading everything for a rickety wooden ship, hanging from the mast and screaming fuck you at other sailors. I almost drowned sometimes, fishing myself out and whispering, I’m a motherfucking pirate.

 

[Clair De Lune]

I can't do things in order ...I have to go where inspiration strikes



Unreliable
__________

'You hate men, don't you?'

She clears her throat.

'Nah, I don't HATE them. They're just so fucking …disappointing'

She takes a drag on her fag and squints at me, smoke rolling up her face.

'DISAPPOINTING…emotionally stunted, BORING, unreliable, HEARTLESS…WEAK, little CUNTSACKS!'

We both laugh.

'I'm not even joking, I'm NOT fucking men ANYMORE.'

I eye her nervously. It's hard to tell whether she's just ranting or if she actually means it this time.

'Like a no peen protest?' I ask.

She smirks.

'Yeah, I'm fucking done'

'Who will you fuck then?'

'I might fuck you, actually!'

I attempt nonchalance.

 

[sojourner]

FEIGN

I’m really good at it now. Practice makes perfect, or at least passable.

I’d listen to them chat at school, wanting to join in but not understanding what they were actually talking about. There was no substance. I couldn’t find the point of it.

Whenever I said anything, they’d stare at me, scornfully. Then the sniggering. Then the shame.

I knew it was important, this ‘small talk’, that it worked as a social gel. That although it was vapidly trivial, it possessed certain themes and rules.

So I taught myself how. And now I can appear ‘normal', for a while.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Feign

On the mornings when I am the first to reach the faculty lounge, I keep my sunglasses on and my headphones in while I make both of us coffee, feeling the shame of enacting this ritual in front of my silent colleagues and affecting either invisibility or insouciance, despite neither being true. The camouflage of leather sandals and floral dresses behind which I have lurked for so long seems useless now, and so I dress the part: the don’t-give-a-fuck blonde in fitted black pants who vapes in the wrong places and who surely does not care who talks, who sees.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Can I have two today, because I am using these prompts to make me write very tight paragraphs in a longer piece I'm trying to compose and this one comes a little bit after the first I posted?

Also Feign:

The Artist wears a mask. He wears too many, and if you do not know how exciting he finds it to hide, how perhaps his only act of creation is in fact deception, and how much of what he plays with concealing is known only to himself and rarely revealed, then you may find yourself trapped between the layers of his disguise, thinking him a truly a ceramicist when he is only a conjurer creating tension between two fears: his and your own. But of course, in these Covid times, his first mask is found, too often, on his face.

 

[sojourner]

ETHER

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is a popular lullaby, first published in 1806.

The star in question is not a diamond, nor is it in the sky.

It is, in fact, a huge celestial body made mostly of hydrogen and helium that produces light and heat from its nuclear core. It resides, arguably, in the ether, which as Aristotle had it, is the fifth element of the earth’s celestial spheres. The sky is the atmosphere above a given point, especially as visible from the ground during the day.

I’m sorry Timothy but I refuse to patronize you. Night night, sleep tight.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Ether:

All summer, the intensity steps up in volume, from zero to eventually ten, in jolting shivers which feel at times so light that meaning bleeds out of them and diffuses into the atmosphere before the eye can fix upon it. The game only becomes explicit as the summer draws to a close and I decide to drag us higher, pushing us off the ledge in order to see if we fall or float. In those weeks of cocktail bars and shape and skin still new enough to blind me, setting this fire seems decadent and luxurious: hedonism distilled to purity.

 

[sojourner]

MELLIFLUOUS

Encircling my temples with the shell-pink petals of her poem, tender balm for ballistic agitation, they tumbled to my nape, fluttering at first to gently ripple over spine and frayed air.

As her sky-blue similes sashayed to my shoulders, a warm wave rose from my feet to my belly, all devotion and throat-kissed prayer.

Gently interlacing through the spacing of my ribs, birthing hundreds of tiny lilac bubbles, they became a sea of ecstacy, to swim beneath my skin.

I was full of every love now, knew nought of human sin, only happiness and harmony and all her words within.

 

[MrCurry]

MELLIFLUOUS

Encircling my temples with the shell-pink petals of her poem, tender balm for ballistic agitation, they tumbled to my nape, fluttering at first to gently ripple over spine and frayed air.

As her sky-blue similes sashayed to my shoulders, a warm wave rose from my feet to my belly, all devotion and throat-kissed prayer.

Gently interlacing through the spacing of my ribs, birthing hundreds of tiny lilac bubbles, they became a sea of ecstacy, to swim beneath my skin.

I was full of every love now, knew nought of human sin, only happiness and harmony and all her words within.

That’s divine!

 

[sojourner]

That’s divine!

Thank you

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Mellifluous

“Ça va?” he asks.

“Oui. Ça va?” She is not sure why she acknowledges this consciously louche man whose studied, cynical nonchalance exhausted her within moments of their first meeting.

“Comme ci, comme ça”. Mellifluous. He sounds like every Anglophone child’s first language lesson.

“Do French people really say that?”

“Only when they want to make English girls blush”.

Their eyes meet as she decodes the homophone. She feels something like optimism. The loneliness bleeds away when you’re playing games with other people, even when you know they’re counting cards; the thrill of poker is in what can be lost.

 

[May Kasahara]

INDIFFERENCE

Left him standing in the rain. Right by the side of the road, for hours. Drinking cocktails, she said, or shopping, or scouted by some modelling agency, that's when she could even be bothered to make up an excuse. Eight years old, poor little lad. Trudging himself home after rugby practice, up that massive long drive under the dripping trees, week in, week out.

And then, when I finally met her, after years of mopping up all his woe and ruin: how light her laugh, how conspiratorial her arm through his, how sly their eyes as they turned to me.

 

[sojourner]

Ooof, shivers again May Kasahara !

 

[sojourner]

(bit of an oblique one today)

SQUARE

NOUN:

Polygon with four sides of equal length and four right angles; an equilateral rectangle.

The product of a number or quantity multiplied by itself; the second power of a number, value, term or expression.

A socially conventional person.

An open space in the center of a town, often containing trees, seating and features pleasing to the eye.

A historic combat formation in which an infantry unit formed in close order.

A vat used for fermentation.

ADJECTIVE:

Honest.
Fair.
Even.

PROPER NOUN:

Tiananmen.
St Peter’s Field.
The Great Square, Amritsar.
The Red Square, Moscow.
The Taksim Square, Istanbul.
Rabaa, Cairo.

 

[sojourner]

Another one just popped into my head!

SQUARE

We start off small and scared, staring wild-eyed at this unframed terrifying expanse called life.

Spend our days honing, scrubbing out the risks, rubbing away danger, polishing up the safe to a bright silver sheen. We frantically hack away at panic, paint over trauma, seal it with a layer of never-again.

Until at the end, all we’re left with is this tiny polished square to look through. An unchanging cube, framed with the good and the righteous, the definite and the reliable. It’s so miniscule you can barely see life through it.

This is where we exit, terrified once more.

 

[Knotted]

I've never written anything before and a hundred words seems a lot

BOUNTY

It was a terrific morning

Jeb Gerri had all the cards

____________________________________But. that. does. not. matter.

When you have a bounty you are two away from a bonce

And
_____________Melk Tangelchair
___________________________________had three bounties

Not only that, the-starble-beaming through the window gave the chacklefolker the photosynthetic energetic insight required to play the squop with gusto-precission

_#Earlier Jeb -
-----------------the ever helpful___________
_____________________________________- had commented on diction and trunk language and Melk's was not up to scratch

_____#Drousers and chairs always had a precarious relationship

The squop was just a half table away

_This was going to be good

 

[sojourner]

Reads like an excerpt from an experimental sci fi novel Knotted . Interesting!

Did you enjoy writing it?

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

This was so hard to write.

Fabricate:

He makes a video for a competition so saturated with cliché that she looks out of the window of the taxi and tries not to cry.

“After watching that, I like you two percent less”. She isn’t joking. She looks at him to gauge his reaction. He adjusts his mask.

He works with materials. Digital. Physical. The video, the clay, but she knows it’s facsimile, fabulation. He labours theatrically and midwifes his own stillbirths, insisting they’re alive. He invites you to be witness and forces you to be either murderer or fool. It’s checkmate both ways. Two routes to self-loathing.

 

[sojourner]

IMPULSE

It is not technically possible to get addicted to dopamine. It occurs naturally in our bodies, and we can't directly take it as a food or drug. However, it is completely possible to get addicted to any activity that increases our dopamine levels.

So chocolate, alcohol, exercise, fighting, stealing. Drabbles. If you’re built like I am, you’re constantly finding new ways to chase that all-consuming high.

And that’s how I ended up with 2 pairs of mismatched wellies, a funeral wreath, a bassoon, 150 tins of ‘hint of musk’ Impulse body spray and a flashing traffic beacon under the bed.