Category Writing

XOXO

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Joy, from the rock band The Carburettors, appears to be a real rock chick. Yes, she looks the part with her neon pink curly hair that can only be  described as dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards-scruffy, black kohl eyeliner, cleavage-revealing vest top, a biker jacket several sizes too large and actually ancient rather than artfully so, a barely there black skirt and tights with runs that speak of hard and long use rather than attacked with a kitchen knife. She is all that a fan would want and more.

Sadly for her band mates though, her heart isn’t really in it, not any more. She’s had enough of groupies and drugs and sex – always the wrong kind of fans, always the saddest of sex. She wants, at the grand old age of 27, to write the Great American Novel. She reads them all, any time she gets the chance and has even been known to read Allen Ginsberg over a hairy shoulder whilst the latest enthusiastic almost-twenty-something guy is doing his best to protract his painfully sweaty three minute performance into something more meaningful and long-lasting, man.

And then she meets the bartender from Seattle. She is stunning, Amazonian, and knows exactly who she is and where she’s at. Disturbingly and more importantly, she has the measure of Joy in moments. She plays her far better than Joy plays her electric guitar, which to be fair, is certainly saying something.

Joy knows she is in thrall to this woman. She knows that if she lets go completely, her Great American Novel will just become another shattered Great American Dream. She has to get away, and fast. But it takes months – hardly fast, at all. Because, unlike most people of her background, she doesn’t own a car, never had. She’d run away to the band at the tender age of 14, before her doting parents could fund her teenage future and her rite of passage of Drivers’ Ed and all that goes with it could grant her freedom. So, she learns to drive, painfully slowly. And all the while, her lover locks all the doors, pins her down and makes Joy hers. Completely.

Joy is 29 now. Still in the band. Still aching to write. Still nothing more than the words ‘Chapter One’ at the front of her notebook. Still in thrall to sex and luv and come to bed eyes.

Ex Oh. Ex Oh-what the fuck…

Cabeceo

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Liz, who reviews books, considers herself to be a plain woman. Not ugly, not even mousey, just not pretty, and certainly not striking. She is unremarkable in every way. Except… the books that she reviews are what, back in the day, Uncle Joe would refer to as bodice rippers, whilst winking in that oily way of his and digging her in her teenage ribs, revelling in the red heat that would rise on her cheeks like a hormone-induced tidal wave.

Strangely, once Uncle Joe discovered that racy literature was her bread and butter, he left her alone. Sometimes, she would find him in the kitchen with Mother and sense that the privacy she had unknowingly breached consisted solely of his unadulterated opinion of her eminently unsuitable job. Not a career mind, just a job, whilst she waited to settle down and produce babies for a grey accountant in the City.

Liz had taken up the Argentine Tango not long after reviewing her first book for Forbidden Fruit. She knew, self-aware that she was, that in the heady environment of swirling skirts and impossibly intimate leg flicks, she truly came into her own. She had found her métier, at last.

Little did Uncle Joe realise that she had spotted him once, not quite hidden at the back of the dimly lit audience at the Meppersley Wood Working Men’s Club. as she swirled, cavorted and leaned in to the tight body of Pablo, her dancing instructor and on-again, off-again fervent and temperamental paramour.

She had seen the sheen of sweat on Uncle Joe’s brow and temples, watched with satisfaction as his cheeks glowed with desire. He had failed to recognise her as he lusted after her full breasts and sinuous, writhing hips.

Oh yes, she is a plain woman in every respect, except that is, on the dance floor.

Hollow – Five Sentence Fiction

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Stonover_Farm_Bed_and_Breakfast_Lenox_Massachusetts_54039

They could not bring themselves to look at his chair, to speak of him, to barely eat the food that had, as always, been laid out so beautifully in front of them.

It was as if the carefully crafted rhythm of their days had been but a fallacy, for he had tricked them all into believing that he was present, that he was there, with them, rather than anywhere else but here, swallowed up by his demons as they chewed and swallowed their food.

“Where is he, Mom, where is Jack?”

She looked down at her youngest, suppressed tears that threatened to burn her with their salt, so strong was the urge to keen, to wail, to shout out the unanswerable question: “Why?”

“I don’t know, honey; hopefully, to a better place for him than here.”

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Here is my latest entry into the lovely Lillie’s Five Sentence Fiction, where she has provided this photo for our inspiration.

Please do visit here to read the entries from other writers who love to keep it short too.