Category Life

Tapestry

freyathewriter 6 Comments

Horatio Smith spends every day telling fibs. This habit is woven throughout the fabric of his days, weeks and months just as threads in a tapestry form a picture. Indeed, if you follow each of the stories Horatio tells, it will tell you a great deal about the man who lives in the attic in the house at the end of the street.

We don’t have time to unravel the entire warp and weft of his fabrications today. No. Horatio is in a great hurry, which is unusual for him. A man who is six feet tall and spindly is not built for speed. He is designed for lounging, for unfolding himself gently and deliberately from his old wing-backed chair, which is positioned just so to the left of his fireplace. In his fertile imagination, the grate burns merrily with logs that have been gathered from a nearby wood and seasoned to perfection. In reality, a two-bar electric fire takes pride of place in the Victorian grate, its electric cord snaking around the chimney breast to a socket which is fixed slightly askew to the plaster-clad wall. Oh, and by the way, there is no ‘nearby wood’. If you peer out of Horatio’s grimy dormer window, all you can see for miles are rooftops. His is not a rural retreat. Continue reading “Tapestry” →

Holiday Flash Fiction

freyathewriter 2 Comments

I’m on holiday, so have penned three short pieces inspired by my countryside idyll. I hope you enjoy them all!

 

This perfect patch of blue, framed by curtains flung wide. The big city, frenetic with self-importance, lingers only as a distant fragment on the edge of my thoughts.

This perfect patch of blue, punctured by a bird of prey, intent, suspended, focused on the earth below. I too am suspended, in splendid isolation.

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We are mesmerised by her sudden twist of friendliness. Her tail twitches imperiously.

Follow me.

We take the cat’s eye tour – the cow barn, the hens, the sheep scattered over the mountain fields. Finally, we reach her boundary, a nodding dandelion not quite at the end of the meandering lane. A final writhe of fur around legs, and she is gone, trotting back to her fireside sanctuary.

Goodbye for now, puss.

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A tractor, bouncing on man-tall tyres – the driver waves us past.

A ewe and her twin lambs, scampering to the steep verge, eyes wide, stopping to chew on grass, just in case.

A mud-splattered van, straining to chug to the top of the hill, clouds of fumes belching from a rusting exhaust.

This is rush hour in the countryside.

The Red Dress

freyathewriter 13 Comments

This story isn’t very pleasant, so please be warned.

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We’ve never had much money.  Put it this way, I come from the sort of family where we don’t buy cream. Mum uses a syringe to syphon off the ‘top of the milk’ to drizzle over puddings, and it’s strictly doled out to make sure nobody has more than anybody else – even Dad.

We spend a lot of time at jumble sales, helping out as well as buying. Anyone who knows anything about jumbles will know that if you help set up the trestles, pile up the clothes, toys and bric-a-brac, sort out the tea urn and custard creams, you get first pick before the crowds surge through the doors. It’s amazing what people chuck out. We get some pretty good stuff, but not knickers though. Mum draws the line at underwear.

Anyway, that’s where my dress comes in. I see it, shoved under an old dressing gown, right before they open the doors and the old biddies elbow their way in. A bright red sundress, hardly worn. Mine. It’s cotton, broderie anglaise Mum calls it, and fitted at the bust and waist. Since I’m finally getting boobs and hips, I will definitely look grown up in it. Best of all, it’s short, way above my knees, and it makes Mum’s eyebrows rise in that way that means she’s really not happy, but won’t say why. It’s perfect. Continue reading “The Red Dress” →