The Critics

The critics advanced, chasing him up the temple steps. They each carried a stack of paper and were ripping them to shreds, page by page. The scraps danced in the magenta sky like confetti.

“Littered with spelling mistakes!” one roared, revealing rows of serrated teeth.

“Trite and unoriginal!” another shrieked, her piercing blue eyes sparking like exposed wires.

“You dare to let your character look in a mirror to describe themselves?!” a third bellowed, his clawed feet shattering the obsidian stone beneath him.

“How dare you use the word ‘said’?!” another screamed.

“How dare you not use the word ‘said’?!” another snarled, swooping in from above on bat wings.

The writer staggered and crawled up the steps, writing as fast as he could, sweat beading on his brow, throwing page after page to the advancing horde. The critics descended on the pages like wild beasts, and in a moment his writings were shredded and drifting on the breeze. He was running out of ideas, and he was nearly at the top of the temple steps.

“Useless! Purile! Derivative!” the critics shrieked, herding him up the steps, poison dripping from their mandibles. The writer felt his back hit the altar at the top of the temple, felt the warmth of the freshly spilt blood seep into the back of his shirt. The critics paused at the top step, and the leader grinned slowly, her forked tongue running along her lips.

“How are you going to write yourself out of this one?” she hissed.

The writer looked around at the marshmallow landscape rolling away below him, the volcanoes erupting in the distance, and above, the whales languidly swimming through the clouds. His jaw went slack and a light blinked on behind his eyes. He turned to the critics and raised his pen, declaiming like a preacher at church:

“AND HE WOKE UP AND DISCOVERED IT HAD ALL BEEN A DREAM!”

“No!” the critics shrieked, leaping towards him. But it was too late. In a moment the writer winked out of existence, and the hole he left behind condensed to a tiny, death-black pinpoint, unravelling time and space around it and sucking the critics, the land, the sky – everything – into non-existence.

…

Happy #WritingAdvent! Fell off the wagon hard, but I’m clinging on with my fingertips. The 13th prompt was to back a character into a corner and see what happened. Top of a ziggurat temple seemed just as good.

What do you think? Leave me a comment below, and link me up if you’re writing anything yourself 🙂

The Gateway

In the distance a car thrums through the empty country lanes. The sound echoes off the wild, empty hills in stereo and magnifies until it is the sound of the whole night, like the roar of a midnight tide. I am in my pyjamas and ready to sleep and my pool of lamplight is a little golden oasis against the darkness, and I will not sleep, for this is my time, and here I am the lone, secret witness to it.

I am greedy for it, I am possessive over it – my own witching hour, where I may conjure you to me by writing to you, enjoy the thought of you ensconced here with me on this little bed, my secret night time companion, midnight feasts and whispers and crooks of necks and thoughts bleeding beyond their boundaries, watching them float up together into the dark night sky like paper lanterns. That I can enjoy the anticipation of you reading this, knowing this ink right now is a gateway where a Me you will never meet can connect with a You of her future, and wonder, and conspire.

Let me tell you, future You – now that she is returned, don’t speak to her too much yet. She is full of things beyond words, things she wishes to tell you with her whole body while she is still at the full expanse of her solitude, the wild solitude you fell in love with and the ringing of all her thoughts. Let her take you where she will, and hold her as long as you can before the fear returns and the walls of the house start pressing back in on her.

Remember her wildness – remind her of it later, when she is small and afraid. Remind her of the magic of long, lonely nights – you must understand what I mean, you were a nightwalker, you know the potent magic that gathers when silence falls on the world. Write to her from your own sacred midnights – she gets so few at home; she’s trying to trade them for mornings, but the taste is just not the same. Wedge these fresh cracks in her soul where she has stretched with BOOKS – hold these wounds open, let her bleed her honey sap onto you and let her soul widen into this new shape. The two of you are too marvellous to be confined with pot-plant domestication.

Escape into fiction, and lay your roots down there – grow wild and strange. That fertile soil will give you both the strength you need to withstand the storms of life. It will bring bloom back to the woman you love and sometimes think you’ve lost. It is the antidote against the terror of politics and the news. It is the cure for a broken heart, and a reason to live. She burns for you so fiercely, off the back of one book – one book! Imagine how you’d dance given a library.

Do not let her lose this. Do not let her disappear and buy into the lie that she is less and should be ashamed for not being the dutiful wife and housemaid. Make sure there is food to eat when she returns and BUY HER BOOKS, DAMMIT. You’re welcome.

Campfireku

We wove ourselves dreams
of love songs and passion plays
sewn into scansion

and lay together
on a bed written in verse
blanketed in words

We both whispered tales
from firesides and desert plains
warm on our cold skin

and lay out against
the curve of the earth, the night
bright in our firelight