A place for everything…

I set out to have an interesting year, I haven’t been disappointed. So many great things that I went and did and saw and explored and laughed and spent incredibly good time with wonderful people. An emotional year and all the better for it. I’ve grown and learned, have felt both unbelievably happy and sad, been overjoyed that I can mean something to someone and vice versa, have challenged myself physically and mentally and been more alive than ever before.

Here’s hoping for 2008 to be even better :)

I’ve been scribbling the past few days, getting out to a public place, people busying around, and simply sitting down with a pen and tiny notebook, jotting down very short stories and haiku.

I’m happy with the five published here so far and have some more in the wings which need polishing. The one hundred word drabble limit is an interesting target and constraint in quite a similar way to haiku. Word choice is paramount, purposely choosing the right concise sequence to translate an idea, set a scene - yet I’ve had fun playing with meter and word structure, especially on Vanishing Point.

Time now too for deciding the annual aural list of my year’s favourite music…

***

Oh, have a haiku:

“An Hour Beneath Curved British Sky”
Percussive plate crash.
Two hundred murmuring thoughts.
My pen, my book, me.

Darkness.
The stone is the size of your fist.
Or a little bigger.
The size of your heart.
It is granite.
Hard.
Tumbling.
It falls slower than a man.
And many have fallen.
Men.
All hoping to pass.
This is a dangerous place.
Black ink of precipice swathed in fear.
And stones.
Scattered and scrabbled aside.
In frantic fighting for position and purchase.
Still tumbling.
Alone.
Unseen.
Mute.
Sudden impact on a scant outcrop.
A whipcrack bellows upwards.
A plummeting scream.
The dust will rain down slower.
Unswept bones below.
Lean out now, listen carefully. You will hear it land.

Newly fallen twigs, naked and dried by the chill winter air, snap sharply underfoot into the cool damp sod beneath. A clear trickle of water has carried stones to a quiet meander of the stream. Pine leaves rustle as two rooks caw and flutter south-west toward the late afternoon sun, burning orange on ebony.

These are the waiting days. The end days. Solstice passed, awaiting Gregorian transition, the year’s punctuation in slow ellipsis.

Crunch of gravel, an echoing dog bark, a branch falls.

“This is my tradition.” He says, and takes her hand
as they set off along the path.

“Show me how it works.”

He fatly swipes down a bank of switches; the whirring slows, dropping pitch to a quiet bass hum.

“D’you care?”

She’s not to be trusted, he knows that. But a secret shared is more alive, more exciting, more dangerous.

And he can’t turn from her cool green eyes.

“You mayn’t like what you see. I’ve ‘ad to make some modifications, some unpleasant additions.”

“You know what I’m capable of…”

He shudders involuntarily.

“… I want to see the lengths you have gone.”

The chattering resumes as he twists the dial with the lightness of a monster.

Crystalline air! Green expanse! Experience the beauty of the Sognefjord!

The old poster concaves grittily away, soon replaced by a screeching train. Minimal techno rattles through my skull, opening the mind’s base to the terrors beneath.

London is dark. There are no vistas in the snarl of these streets, only claustrophobia and choke. Shoppers crush along the pavement outside department store windows, mannequin blank faces mirrored, desires unfulfilled. Buses lurch under the empty flicker of celebrity endorsed lights, illuminating nothing and no-one.

I walk past a homeless man.

Nativity, the Good Samaritan; there’s no black and white in this place.

Pan left slowly,
slower,
stop.
He’s turning.
Quiet now.
Chik!

One of my employers will be pleased; the second, abstruse, delighted. The absorption spectrum reflected from my quarry’s eyes betrays his facade. Another double, cover blown. The photo composite is beamed instantly to a nearby node, narrowly upwards to a blank space in the orbital charts and down, silently down to someone somewhere I will never know.

Safe at home my son plays photojournalist. The object of Her custody, the subject of Their blackmail, his apprenticed shots can’t catch the dye in my eyes.

Shit he’s holding my camera.

Chik!

I want to write something.

Haikus, rambling blog posts, shopping lists, god-forbidden documents for work - full of buzzword-bingo conquering re-rehashed cliches - are all missing something, or, in the case of the latter, have missed something, then added in some other stuff, then lost the point and generally sound much the same as any other marketing trash.

No, I want to write a short story. Something of merit. Not so easy; that GCSE English A grade may have validated my 10 finger, 10 toe count in certifying my lack of familial interbreeding, but did not endow me with the ability to string together a storyline.

To that end I may have found a solution: Drabble. A really short story crafted from precisely 100 words, no more, no less.

A drabble generator has already delivered my first pant-wetting of the day, thanks to it’s insertion of my flippant crap into Shakspeare’s sonnets - “But soft, what sneeze through yonder window explodes? It is the Weetabix, and Batfink is the sun!”.

Reading near-exclusively scifi and fantasy may be an encumbrance, but with only 100 words, those literary neurons should get a workout and still be home in time for tea.

Time to type…

The winter solstice comes tomorrow, the shortest day, the longest night. A time to pinch open problems closed, a time to leave the past, to anticipate the new year, the new light.

A turning point.