The Spider

Here's this week's Whimword entry. The crowdfunding thing is still going on, of course, but it's nice to take a break.

He paused for a moment on his way out when the spider caught his eye. It was only a little money spider, but there was something beautiful about it. He watched it, weaving this way and that through the bicycle's spokes, shooting tiny gossamer threads behind it. It was sort of mesmerising, the way it did that, building the web, one strand at a time. It made the bike come back to life for a second, healing it. He hadn't ridden it in years and the thing was so rusted, it was about to crumble into dust, but that spider...

"Come on," the officer called from outside. "I ain't got all day." He looked up at the doorway, but he didn't move. He wasn't done yet. He couldn't see the officer from where he was sitting, and if he closed his eyes, he could pretend he wasn't there. He could pretend it was just another day.

He thought about the day he bought the house. There were spiders then, too - hundreds of them, live and otherwise, cobwebs clinging to every surface, dust everywhere. No one had lived in it for a good twenty years and it was basically falling apart, but he loved it the minute he saw it. He could see the strong, steady bones of it, the life it could have again. It was a good house. Good things had happened there. He opened his eyes again and looked around the room. The bike was propped up against one wall, just the way it had been when Dotty was still there. He could still see her sometimes, at the very edges of his vision, laughing in the bedroom, watching him from the kitchen. But he could never turn his head fast enough to see her properly.

She'd loved this house, too. It was supposed to be their home. It was supposed to be forever. They poured so much of themselves into it, making it perfect, making it theirs. Oh well, he thought. There were bad things, too, of course - the things that had brought him here, brought him to this point. There was pain and sadness, anger and bitterness. There were things he couldn't take back, things he couldn't forgive. It was hot outside, the air breathless and full of electricity the way it was before a storm. But he felt cold all of a sudden. A shiver ran through him and he was back in the present.

"Buddy, come on," the officer yelled, his voice a little meaner. "It's time."

As he got up, he saw an unwary insect had flown into the web, its wings all gummed up as it tried to wriggle free. The more it struggled, the more stuck it became. It was only a matter of time before the spider got to it. He felt a little prickle in his eye as he watched the wretched creature.

"You and me," he said out loud. "We got a lot in common."

Dirigible

Here's another go at the Whimword challenge, and this time, it's on time! I must say, I enjoy this. It's good to make sure I keep writing while I do the whole crowdfunding thing. 

I wonder sometimes what the people on the Hindenburg airship thought when the whole thing went up in flames. I think it must have been something like what Andy was thinking towards the end of things. All happening in slow motion, or the 1937 equivalent. No escaping now. We’re going to die and it’s going to hurt more than we can bear and we’ll always be remembered as the people who died here. We were the triers, the doers, the adventurers and look what it got us.

I think the people on the ground, watching, must have been thinking something like what we were thinking while we watched him destroy himself. Rigid with horror. Powerless, but transfixed. Andy was an adventurer, too, or he was before…before. It was what I loved most about him. He was exciting. He climbed things. He jumped out of things. He crashed society parties. He sang, all the time, out loud. He danced like a wild man. Women fell at his feet. He lived.

No one could say for sure what changed or why, but somewhere along the way, the light went out in him. It didn’t happen all at once. It was more like a candle, sputtering, burning down to the wick. Giving up. He stopped living long before he died. He tried to brush it aside at first, tried to pretend it was nothing. He’d be fine, he said. Just a little funk, he said, that’s all. Happens to the best of us, he said, and then he laughed, and I believed him. We all did, for a while. But you can’t relight a candle when there’s nothing left to burn.

There was something apt about the way he went out. It was like he was trying to reignite himself. The difference between his ending and the Hindenburg, I suppose, is that it wasn’t an accident, no matter what the police report said. He stole his brother’s sports car, and crashed it, going a hundred miles an hour, into the side of a townhouse. He took out himself, the car and half the ground floor in one big ball of flames. It was almost impressive, if you didn’t stop to think about it.

Here’s to you, Andy, I guess. I loved you more than you ever knew. The trier. The doer. The adventurer. The doomed dirigible passenger. 

My novel

It's time. I am now commencing banging on about this everywhere I can. I've already done it on my other blog. I've already done it on email and Facebook and Twitter. The novel is written. The crowd-funding page is up. You can find it here.

This has been a long time in the making but we're not there yet, so if anyone who reads this feels inclined to pledge, I'd be incredibly grateful. Modern times being what they are, it's now vanishingly rare for debut novelists to get big book deals straight out of the gate, so I've decided to go a different way.

I was sceptical at first, I admit, but I've seen the quality of the work that comes out of Unbound and I am heartily impressed. I only hope people are also impressed enough with me!

I must also add that I am already incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped so far. I'm truly humbled by your generosity!

By the way, don't forget this is the first draft and will be edited, but if you do pick up any little hiccups (like my mum noticed I'd said "jumble sale", which is a UK thing, instead of "rummage sale", the US equivalent) let me know and I'll make a note.

Seed

The reason I've been so lax lately is that I've been finishing off my novel. Below is a bit of flash fiction, inspired by Whimword. It's much too late for the deadline but I enjoyed writing it, so I thought I'd share it anyway. 

"It's a nice set up you got here," Bunger said. "Real nice." He pursed his lips thoughtfully, and walked around touching things he shouldn't have been touching. Solomon twitched, but he didn't say anything. He scurried up behind Bunger, whose oddly long legs had taken him clear across the hydroponic house already. Swinging his equally long arms, he knocked into a couple of seed trays along the way. They didn't fall, but Solomon felt his stomach lurch all the same. Those were the ones that hadn't sprouted yet, the ones that needed constant tending until the little green shoots poked up above the surface. Five years' work setting all this up, he thought. Five years' work.

"How much you give me for the latest produce?" he asked. Bunger looked down at him. He seemed like a giant all of a sudden, eyes full of condescension and spite, a hundred miles above Solomon's head. He looked away, but he couldn't hide. He could feel Bunger's gaze burning the top of his head. Like sunshine on a hot day, though he barely remembered that. The only light he had was entirely synthetic and had been for the last five years. More, in fact. "Well?" he pressed, drawing himself up as tall as he could. Bunger narrowed his eyes.

"Five hundred," he said. His voice sounded firm. Solomon blanched.

"Five hundred?" he whispered. "That'll barely cover the cost of replacing the seeds." Bunger closed his eyes altogether.

"Best and final," he said. Solomon felt his shoulders slump. Synthesising the seeds was an expensive process, but he didn't have a lot of choice. Buyers were fewer and fewer lately, and Bunger was the first one in four days.

"Ok. Ok," he said. "But you bag it up and take it out yourself. No delivery." Bunger opened his eyes. He looked surprised, but he nodded.

"Fine. You got yourself a deal. I'll be back when I need more."


Solomon watched glumly as Bunger's guys bundled his beautiful tomatoes and plums and carrots and peas into the big plastic sacks that would take them to the settlement, a hundred metres above their heads, and two miles to the south. He sometimes wished he could go back there and live in the sunshine, such as it was, but people like Bunger ran things up there, and he couldn't bear that. People who thought they were entitled to power just because they were bigger and stronger. Here, at least, he had a little agency. Here, he was something like a success. He'd grown fruit bearing plum trees in a matter of weeks. He'd grown fat, red tomatoes, bigger and juicier than their non-synthetic ancestors ever were. He could eat whatever he didn't sell, and best of all, there were the flowers. Nobody else had flowers anymore.

Baby

Good lord, it's a new poem! I wrote this about six months ago and have just now got round to fine-tuning it.

I think I want you
I think I do

But you see
The very idea
Of you -
And you are
Still just an idea
Still just a far off
Concept of conception -
Even that
Fills me with a terror
That's bigger
Than death.

Even though
You'll start tiny
And stay tiny
For what will
Come to seem
Like a fraction
Of a fraction
Of a second,
The magnitude
Of what you'll mean
Is beyond all comprehension.

At first
You'll be this
Little
squiggly thing -

A comma
Before you fledge
Fully into
An exclamation.
A pause, a breath
Before you form.
All red and wrinkled

And soft
Scarily soft
Too soft
For this hard
Horrible world
Full of hard
Horrible
Painful
Angry things.

But there you'll be
pure and blank,
Unwritten yet
Like the purest, blankest
Snow,
And I'll write
My wrongs on you,
Inscribe in your
Unknowing skin
My sins.

Let me be honest -

This once
Because you know
I'll lie
At every turn -

I'll fear
Losing you
I'll fear
Hurting you
Beyond repair
I'll fear
Without meaning to
That I'll make
Meanings for you
That you never meant
To mean

I'll fear
Making you
Like me.
Broken
And patched together
Haphazardly
Over and over
And over again.

But I want you
I think I do
Because fear
Is not reason enough
Not to want you

I want to live you
Live you
Love you
Write you
Alive and lovely
I want to
Be filled up
With the life
Of you

And watch you,
With uncomprehending
Eyes, take
Your first big, bawling
Uncomplicated
Gulp of this air
That will be ours.

I'll will you
Into the world
I'll believe you
Into existence
And you'll come
All too quickly
Screaming out of me -

Precious.

Perfect, but
Not perfect, of course
Like any other human
Frail and flawed
Full of promise
Fulfilled and otherwise
But perfect
Still in my
Biased eyes.

And then

When you're here
then
I'll find out
For sure whether
Your eyes are
A quiet, fearless
Brown
Or a fidgety, fussy
Blue

Whether your skin
Is pale, poorly
Pallid
Or a full
Hearty chestnut
And I'll want
to protect you
To swaddle you
With so much love
That you can hardly
Breathe.

And however much I might
have wanted to before
I won't be alone anymore
And I won't want to be
Because I'll want you
Because I'll have you
And you'll be
Inescapably
Beautifully
Mine.

No queen

Another rejected one. I did something unusual with the formatting, but I can't quite remember what so I've tried to approximate it here:

No
          (Scream it
For all the good it'll do)
A marriage bed, 
               this ain't
All hands, no heart
               no help
He's king
  Again
    Again
      Again
Lie flat, 
            sleep
And let the tears
           come
Secret, beneath your 
           eyelids
Tell no one
They all know 
          anyway
And laugh
         Sneak home
In bloody clothes
Carry
       your new wound
In stricken hands
Count your bruises
      One by one
Try it on for size
Who are you 
      now?
Not his
  Not this
    Nothing, surely


No queen

A history of our ending

I found these floating around in my email from several months ago. I submitted them to an online poetry magazine and didn't get anywhere (a bit of a recurring theme with me) so here they are. I quite like them. It was an experiment in simplicity and I think it came off ok. See what you think:

Knuckles

I miss your knuckles.
That sounds strange,
But I liked the way
They grazed my cheek
So gently, despite the
Roughness of your
Weathered skin.

You seemed so
Hardy, a great oak
Of a man, and I thought
You'd set down roots
In my soil,
Tough and sinewy,
Like your brawny arms.

So I was surprised
When you quietly
Slipped away from me.
It didn't happen all at once,
But gradually, you receded
Until at last
There was nothing left.

I've seen your face
Since then, in dreams
Or trees or clouds, or
Other men, and fancied
You were still with me,
Still loving me the way
You once did.

Afterwards

In the nights that followed
Your departure, I drowned
In cheap booze, in the hope
Of drugging my addled mind.
And in the hazy, hopeless days
I woke up, blinded by the sun and
My own sorrow, unfailingly
Angry with the kids next door
For their youth and carelessness.

Your ghost hung bright and
Luminous on those nights,
An image burned behind
My tired eyes. A phantom,
Your weight was missing, though -
No hand on my stomach, no
Knees tucked behind mine, no
Mouth pressed to my neck.

The worst of it was the silence.
I screamed at the empty space
Where you should have been,
Demanding answers, and when
You failed to appear and tell me
Why, I hated you. I hated you.
I can't forgive you and now, for not
Forgiving you, I can't forgive myself.

Picture

I have a picture of you
Smiling, which you so
Rarely did, in the sun,
Near a lake.
There are trees
And grass and a picnic
Behind you.
You look so happy
And every time I see it
I want to
Hold on to that.
I want to feel
The way we felt then.
I want to smell
The air and the grass
And the strawberries
I imagine you picked.
I imagine the day
We spent there.
I imagine we made love
Under one of those trees.
I want to call to mind
That best of afternoons,
But I can't remember
Where it was taken
And now every time
I see that picture,
It kills me
A little more.