SHORT STORY COMPETITION: Creative Competitor

Dear all,

Here's a short story competition entry I can now blog as the time period for selection has passed. Check out the competition on the link below. The maximum word count was 800 and the theme was 'nostalgia'.

Creative Competitor 

http://creativecompetitor.com/creative-writing-competitions/creative-writing-competitions-2016/nostalgia-fiction-writing-competition

Raise the Drawbridge

I would like to go back five years, not six hundred. What did you do Henry? Once discarded, why not destroy it all so I would have no reminder?

Over the waving white blossom I see three white towers and behind those, one mile or perhaps a million, the rocket ship of St George’s Wharf Tower. My dislocation has found some comfort.

I had a misfortune today, or rather three. Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! My triptych trauma! How did Henry deal with a repetition in name and in pain? His crāwe-in-the-throat of Catherines? Good Henry, bad Henry! I command thee arise and help me! Well… maybe it is best not to ask. 

From 1935 I entered 1479 and smiled at the steel within the trusses, the beauty of the old and the new, the will to survive, of how to grow old gracefully. There is always a way! A thigh high wooden table, its two carved legs as stout to my own as a lumberjack’s neck is to a baby’s finger, made me want to smash down a goblet of mead on its aged but polished surface. A Visitors Book lay on top, open with pen askew. It is four o’clock in the afternoon now, so it would have been nearly three then, on a Thursday so the pages were full of names from the week’s activity. There, in time and in place, both the here and now, and my every waking moment, is her name repeated: once, twice and thrice! How can it be that three guests with the same name appear in sequence? What cruel mockery did the universe employ for its pleasure, hurting me with its Royal Flush of coincidence? Light from the blue sky fell over the gallery-come-lately, the ancient seeming crisscrossed stained glass, the Sun and the Rose, posing my shock cinematic. Was it a sunny day when she was here too? I cannot remember. I feel her looking at me, smiling in the Wild Flower Meadow; I feel her press against me as we navigate through the crowds in the narrow opening of the Sunken Rose Garden and I feel the heat of her legs as they lay over my lap on the South Lawn, but… I cannot remember. There is no joy imagining feasts instead of silent-headphoned-tourists as I peer over the edge, the creaking floorboards urging me to shuffle forth. I wish I could be back there, centuries before she was born so I would never know. I could be the fool or the King, and be released. I look up and wonder if the eavesdroppers remember us and I picture her face, but… I cannot remember. We had walked amongst the present and the history, wrapped up in no one’s procession but ours; that day was the trumpet call of our future. Half a decade later, a blink for the Great Hall, a lifetime for me, and I have managed a day-to-day acceptance. I do not remember what I do not allow to be thought, and I do not miss what I deny had existed. Then I see her name, threefold, and I remember I loved her and I love her still. The empty palace holds its own memories and now it holds mine. 

I cross the North Stone Bridge and leave the past behind for today, yet she walks by my side, her hand in mine, while I plead for a future as the willow weeps.

Have a great week all,

R.G Rankine

www.rgrankine.com

www.thinkingplainly.com 

SHORT STORY ENTRY: Writers Reign

Dear all,

Here's a short story competition entry I can now blog as the time period for selection has passed. Check out the competition on the link below. The maximum word count was 1500 and the theme was of our own choosing. I'm afraid I don't think a whole lot of this one as reading it back it's obvious I rushed it but never mind, I'm glad I entered it anyway as you learn from every attempt, even the rubbish ones.

Writers Reign

http://writersreign.co.uk/wr-short-story-competition.html 

Cara

The apartment block was fearful but I mustered a smile. I saw myself through her eyes and could tell I looked like a child who had received a gift they didn’t care for. Cara rarely swore, in my day at least, but this wasn’t the Cara I knew. She cussed several times as she walked around the flat, flinging a finger through doorways, showing me the rooms. It didn’t take long: bedroom, bathroom and all in one kitchen-dining-front room.

‘Amy’s still outside?’ I said, wondering if Cara wanted her to join us. Amy was the one who called me.

Cara walked past me, her skinny frame reminiscent of a Halloween toy, one of those jangling skeletons you hang from doorframes. She opened the front door and shot Amy a thumbs-up. Cara knew she had been too much for any best friend to cope with and had gifted Amy her battered old car (that still actually belonged to her father) as a kind of don’t give up on me apology. If it wasn’t for Cara being banned I may have felt differently about it but I’ve learnt to ignore the things that don’t really matter and Amy’s not a mercenary. Why let it rust I guess. After picking me up Amy told me she had listened to Cara’s the-next-one-will-be-better fantasy while pulling her half dead from hostel or bedsit or squat or shop doorway for the best part of a year and this was the last time. Not the last time she had already threated Cara with so many times but really: the last time. I told her I believed her.

‘It’s a shithole isn’t it?’ Cara said, turning as she closed the door. Her right eye seemed to be constantly screwed closed, and the angle of her head tilted to her right shoulder. I couldn’t help but think she was still beautiful. Not that I was going to say it.

‘No, it’s not.’ I said, truthfully. The area was a shithole yes, but inside the flat had surprised me, freshly painted, double-glazed, all brand new necessities: bath, cooker, and central heating. There was a knock on the door and as Cara cautiously opened it, Amy rushed in and gave her a tight hug. I could hear the air from Cara’s lungs being squeezed out. Amy was crying and as she let Cara go and dashed back out I could see a thick red line around Cara’s neck where Amy had held her. As the door slammed Cara started to cry too.

‘She hates me,’ Cara said, tears flowing but her body remarkably still and composed.

‘She loves you,’ I said.

Cara shrugged and sat down in the front room.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I asked. I was acting like I was visiting a grandparent at death’s door. I’d be asking about hot water bottles and soup next but that’s what being in her presence made you like. The Cara I knew was from another era.

‘Everything’s in the cupboards, don’t know which ones. Amy put it all away,’ Cara replied, staring at an empty corner of the room where I suppose a television would have been in normal circumstances. She didn’t actually say yes or no. Don’t ask her a lot of questions, Amy had said, she withdraws. She wasn’t joking. As Cara tucked into herself, her spine protruding like a stepping stone pathway, I felt overcome with shame. I hated her guts, she had hurt me so badly, but what sort of man was I to leave a young vulnerable woman on her own? Shouldn’t I have done something sooner?

‘Do you still take sugar?’ I said from the other side of the room, wondering as I said it if that was the only way she got any energy. I saw her shrug again and as I turned back to search a cupboard at random, it was my cue to burst into tears. This could have been five years ago. Making tea before we settle down for a film. Where could we have ended up? I didn’t dare let her see my face but I knew she was bound to hear me crying. My head was nearly inside the damn cupboard trying to hide when I felt her arms slip around my chest. I hadn’t heard her move. My tears escalated to a wail and I grabbed her arms with one hand and without turning around reached the back of her head with my other; carefully, I knew how fragile she was. Her face pressed into the back of my neck and her tears slid down my back. It was the first time I had felt her skin against mine since we were together and I knew it like it was my own. She was so soft, so delicate. The newness of the flat suddenly stank. I couldn’t stop tasting it. We shouldn’t be here I thought. It was like a controlled death. A cage painted like a suburban idyll where no families would grow up, no congratulations cards would come through the letterbox and no ambitions realised. I knew I would take her with me when the time was right.

‘Your hair smells the same,’ I said. I was choking from crying and the words stuttered but she heard me. I turned around and she was still looking down, her closed eyes fell against my chest and the scars that ran down her arms glowed lilac against the sickly transparency of her complexion.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. I wanted to tell her she had nothing to be sorry for, but I didn’t.

‘We have a lot to thank Amy for,’ I said. I felt my hands running through her hair, stroking the base of her neck and the back of her skull. She looked terrible but to me it felt like one quick shower and she would be back to new, ‘I miss you so much,’ I hadn’t planned to say it but the words fell out.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. This time I felt like saying I was sorry too, but I didn’t.

‘I’m glad Amy called,’ I said as I held her; the shape of her body fitting inside me as it always used to, despite her frailty, and as I felt her body become mine, and mine hers, I understood that this was the Cara I knew, I had been stupid to pretend otherwise.  

Have a great weekend all,

R.G Rankine

www.rgrankine.com

www.thinkingplainly.com

SHORT STORY ENTRY: Creative Competitor

Dear all,

Here is another short story competition entry I can now blog as the time period for selection has passed. Check out the competition on the link below. The maximum word count was 1000 and this time the criteria was for 'descriptive fiction writing' and an optional photo prompt, which I sort of used... 

Creative Competitor 

http://creativecompetitor.com/creative-writing-competitions/creative-writing-competitions-2016/descriptive-fiction-writing-competition-april/

Weekend Filters

A narrow slit of light remains and floods the unwanted outside world, inside. Bobby has misjudged the alignment of A4 papers. Now the dust and who-wants-to-know-what-else flying around in the air, normally invisible, is twinkling and shimmering as if his bedroom were a large Snow Globe cracked open. But Bobby’s used to it and dismisses thoughts of the unavoidable gulps of contaminated air. He moves back to the computer and prints out five more sheets, enough for another column. The cha-cha-cha of the printer doesn’t take long. Some Sellotape. Gentle pressure. Job complete. Every square inch of some bright spark’s 1956 post-apocalyptic dream, the eight towers of his so-called community, with its hundreds of concrete precast panels, are shut out. And with it, a grey that in the entire world was only out-greyed by the political will that had allowed it. Bobby stood back from the window, more relaxed now that his floating dead skin is obscured, and was pleased with his work. His bedroom was now a backlighted wonder. For the next three hours until the sun goes down he would be basked in a tricolor of blue, orange and green. His head cooled by storm clouds, his trunk heated by the fire of a tropical sunset and his legs and feet enlivened as they walked within lush grass on a rainforest’s edge. This weekend was for wildlife! The adventure could begin! The computer speakers masked the dull, rumbling traffic and shrill engines and beeps of mopeds and cheap motorbikes that shook his room morning until night with the tweets and calls of exotic birds and the panpipes and flutes of soothing indigenous melodies. Bobby was an explorer!

As Sunday nears its end and the shop shutters below him crash shut Bobby hears his mother call out. Bath and bed! That’s the way. The weekend has disappeared as quickly as his daring energy; the tiger hunts and Ayahuasca experimentation; the treks, and ruin explorations. But it was the best escape yet. It would take some beating, but already he was excited by next weekend’s potential. The social housing complex fills his view again and the rainforest fills his bin. Bobby soaks in the bath and visualizes his next journey. He has been thinking of ‘The Future’ for a while now. He is not convinced his Photoshop skills match his ambition but with the right layers and filters, more online tutorials and a small amount of begging his mother for a new cyan ink cartridge, he may just pull it off. Next weekend his bedroom will be on the fifth floor of a mega metropolis skyplex, the post-nuclear-common-year 235, in a city that is only known by the name history books list as Goshogawara. Bobby supposed there might be some grey, but it will be a better grey.

Have a great weekend all,

R.G Rankine

www.rgrankine.com

www.thinkingplainly.com