Category: prose
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17 January: dVerse Prosery (Flash Fiction)
Stitched Up We measured moody clouds by hand widths, and when we bored ourselves of that, we played cops and robbers. We pointed fingers at each other, and then blew smoke off our fingertips. You made siren sounds. I was the bad guy. It was always me falling down dead. And Mum sat on the…
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23 Nov: Prose for Miz Quickly
A Poem Not Beginning with a Line by Elizabeth Barrett Browning I’m just a slug on the wet inner-face of the discourse, writes Jack Underwood. I don’t know Jack Underwood, but I read what he wrote, and assume lots of people also read him, and I believed every word he wrote about dead rabbits, and…
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23 Nov: NovPAD Day 23
Prose: Postscripts to a Story Once upon a time, my dad and I were a story. I speak about him in the narrative now. My dad was Swedish, but turns out that might not be so. My sister swabbed her mouth for an ancestry DNA test, and discovered that she’s German and English. Seems Dad’s…
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21 August: That Old Photo
Note: this is pure fiction based on an image at Café of Imaginary Dreams. That Old Photo: Ekphrastic Prose On the right is Jeff. Granny S named him after Jefferson. Not that Jefferson. Jefferson Street, where she worked as a waitress on Saturday afternoons, where Grandpa S always came in for his regular burger with…
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15 Aug: Prose #FFFC
Another Song A passer-by offers confetti cubes of stale bread, casually thrown into the thicket of wings, and the air is trampled. What does it mean, all that hysterical noise that shakes the air, those elbow wings cutting sunlight, and enfolding space. Birdsong echoes against the clouds. Shrieks that cling as if by claw. Its…
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14 June: dVerse Prosery
Prosery Thinking There are places I’ll never reach because my feet ache, and there are mornings when I see a sunrise and it feels ancient and seamless, and it saddens me to see its oxygen-rich colours bleeding across the world, and sometimes the sound of new day reminds me that I’m minus one more, and…
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1 June: Sanctify
Sanctify I remember our last goodbye. A small slip of a tear between us. A kiss on the cheek. Yours felt surprisingly cold for a scorched autumn day, and I remember the blue-eyed sky, the old orchard, apples that fell like red hoofs thundering on the ground, and sunlight was my eternal joy. I have…
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21 May: 2Cellos & Playing at the Ritz
2Cellos and Playing at the Ritz Mum paid for my piano lessons, but I paid for them with fingernails clipped to the quick (a classmate said, Eeeow, you chew your fingernails. No, I said, I play the piano). I practised two hours a day. An hour before school, and an hour after. The piano was…
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V.1 C.3 Tooth Fairy
The tooth fairy came last night, and left me loose tooth money. I might stop doing chores for money. I’ll just wait for my teeth to fall out. Why … V.1 C.3 Tooth Fairy
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16.02.22 dVerse Prosery
Fish Moon New Year’s Eve means cod. Always has. Alway will. So we head for the harbour. The whole family, and a few who aren’t, squeezing into the old Volvo, always bits of Pop’s job in the back. Trowels rough with mortar, buckets, crusty boots, white overalls. Pop’s a bricky. Bricklayer. Muremand. We race down…
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