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Writing Contest #8 - Entries
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by
Jud
(new)
Nov 22, 2012 02:23AM
Please read all the entries and then vote for your favourite. Voting ends next Wednesday, one of our lovely moderators will create a poll when they are free. (If you need a list of titles for this just PM me)
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Responsibility"Go on - get out there!" she'd said, as grumpy as usual. Ever since she'd been sitting on that nest she'd been bending my ear about my performance. "It's all very well, doing that fantastic show just to lure me in. My mother warned me about cocks like you - all soaring melodies and aerobatics till you get what you want!"
My dear hen's words ringing in my ears I had left the nest, climbed to my favourite height and opened my beak. It wasn't true, what she said - my voice was just as good, I knew it. But all that worry about bringing up our four new chicks once they hatched was bound to affect a chap's performance. I could hear the strain in the other guy's voices too, and there was no doubt the exaltation was a bit flat this morning. Perhaps I could cheer her up with a nice grub I thought, hopefully. Or a few fluffy grass seeds, she'd been very fond of those when we were courting. Heartened, I could feel the music swell in my breast and soaring I climbed to the sun.
All ChangeI promised I’d always be there if she needed me. It’s a grandma’s job to watch over the youngsters, spoil them rotten, and smooth things over when they clash with their parents. That’s what I’d been doing for years, and if I had my way, death wouldn’t change anything.
*
Gran said she’d always be there if I needed her. She promised.
Suddenly she wasn’t.
I was in bed when the phone rang. As I blinked at my alarm clock in the early hours I guessed something dreadful had happened. But not to Gran. In her lifetime she’d never spent a day ill in bed - thanks to bran flakes and gin, she maintained. I used to imagine her pouring Gordon’s on her cereal in the morning.
We’d been planning a surprise party for her ‘significant’ birthday the following month. It would also have been a send-off party for the four of us; we were moving down south so Mum and Dad could start a new business. At the age of fifteen I was leaving my friends, the school I’d attended since I was four, the house I’d always lived in, and numerous pets that were buried in the garden.
I’d just about come to terms with all that. Gran was coming with us, so everything would be OK.
‘A change is as good as a rest,’ she used to say. I couldn’t see how any more. I’d been left to cope with change, while she’d gone for a rest.
Change - Breaking the SilenceThe brief, fluttering of wings, the liquid notes, the stuttering flight; the lark ascends through the early summer evening, above the meadow with its diverse and multi-coloured flowers. 1850? No, 2012.
There has been so much change in the countryside. Horses were the engines of the farm. Manpower was cheap and you could fuel a farm lad with endless apple pies from the farm orchard. World War 1 altered so much of that. The lads, even the horses, went to war. Mechanisation made them all redundant. Things changed. They had to change. To save manpower, herbicides and insecticides were increasingly used. Habitats were lost and birds’ eggs were damaged by DDT and their shells were no longer viable.
Rachel Carson woke us up. In 1962 she wrote The Silent Spring which told us in horrifying detail where we were heading. Some insecticides were banned. Bird and plant populations gradually built up and now, where I live, I can see meadows which farmers leave, not only for their natural beauty but to take a hay-cut for animals and to provide a habitat. I grew up within walking and cycling distance of countryside in which I never saw or heard a lark. I never saw cowslips but now, one of our other oft-derided changes has provided motorway embankments on which they flourish.
We can, and have, made regrettable changes to our surroundings and the quality of our lives. If we have the will, we can still change them back.
EncoreIt was cold in the subway. Ariellah begrudgingly removed her gloves. She fumbled with the clasps on her violin case, but was more delicate when removing the instrument, as if her being was somehow entangled in its strings.
Ariellah launched into the music, and despite the biting cold and her apparent loneliness among masses of people, all moving past her in the blink of an eye, she felt her spirits lift. Like the lark, she was rising, higher and higher, further and further away from the hopelessness of her own situation and towards the light that only music could shine on her. She felt herself smile, and closed her eyes to savour the moment.
She could have been a famous musician. Her parents had spent a small fortune funding her musical education, and in return she had spent a huge part of her life trying to make them proud, to achieve what was expected of her.
But she had cracked under the pressure, the ever-increasing standards she was subject to. Music made her happy, she played the violin because she loved it above all else - she wanted people, musicians and audience members alike, to enjoy it for what it was, not for the money, not the fame or the prestige.
She spotted a cellist she had briefly worked with making his way through the subway. He recognised her talent - he allowed himself a brief glance and then looked away. She smiled. She regretted nothing. She played.
A Life in ReverseHe lies perfectly still on the bed. A white sheet covers his face and a young lady is resting her head on him, tears rolling onto the white sheet.
Suddenly, the white sheet slides away and the man takes his first breath. The young lady, his daughter, is stroking his hand. His breathing is shallow at first, almost non-existent, but then it strengthens and the man’s hollow and lined faced starts to fill out. Wrinkles smooth out and his hair thickens and loses its ghostly white quality.
The daughter shrinks and turns to nothing as the man enters his wife’s body. He lets out an ecstatic moan and man and wife embrace each other in a gentle rocking movement before separating, clean and untouched. They drift apart never to see each other again.
The young man stands alone in class, reciting a poem. His fellow classmates are sniggering at him. His face is bright red and his voice newly deep. The laughter stops abruptly as his voice goes up an octave. The light dusting of hair on his upper lip is absorbed by his skin, leaving him fresh-faced and care-free.
The boy is quietly playing in a sandpit when he’s dragged along the ground, tied up, screaming, and forced towards a dark hole. Just before he enters into his own mother, he sees nurses shouting and frantic. Then the nurses back off and he sees his mother for the last time, as she takes her own first breath.
PoppiesI was lost the day the guns started to fire out over the churning meadows. Lost to Mam and to our Mary-Ann, to the routines of the mill town childhood. Lost, tumbling in a daily grind of noise and cold and death.
I was found again in Joseph’s arms as we clung together naked in the dark, often weeping, always holding on as the guns raged and the other fellows turned the blind eye.
Then lost, utterly, as one tiny piece of fate took out his beautiful white body and pulled it blackened into hell on the eve of his seventeenth birthday. Leaving me to keep on living in the filth and ordure of, surely, the end of all things.
But it didn’t stop; I didn’t stop. I carried on among the broken minds and the broken bodies and became a part of it all. A fearsome foe to my enemy; then later an object of fear in a country that had not waited for us.
And I was not to be found in the depths of a bottle or at the extreme end of my anger. Not through the endless, the tedious, cold years.
*
Poppies? Now there’s a thing.
How is it so quiet now in these once raging fields?
How can I be so worn out an old body, with Joseph beside me still in the freshness of his youth; holding my hand and smiling at last; lost, forever lost in a waving sea of red.
EclipseThe geisha strummed the three strings of her shamisen for her Samurai master. The instrument's body encased in catskin that held the sweet vibrations like a purr. Its silk strings fashioned of the same material as the kimono in which she was draped. She was his flower in the pleasure quarters and his willow throughout the rest of the house, as she fed his soul with poetry, dance, calligraphy and grace. At night, to preserve her elaborate hair pinned with turtleshell, she slept with her head on a block and a bed of rice around its base to alert her, were her crown to roll off the wood.
Then after the bombs, the Americans occupied the land. Now her silk kimono sat uncomfortably. She could feel the silk writhing over her body, as if the worms sought to reclaim their cocoons for their unborn broods. The shimasen's silk strings came away from the catskin body, as they too protested their indenture. Her master took his pitiless steel and rendered Seppuku. His insides unravelling like the insurgent strings on her shamisen. Tresses escaped their turtleshell grips. No more of flowers and willows. The long dark winter had eclipsed Japan's ever rising sun.
All amazingy different again! I can never guess which is my own daughter's. Is that bad?
I voted, but it was a really hard choice, they were all so good.
I've voted! Great standard again.Bit depressed after reading them all though ;)
I think I'm going to reread them a couple of times. After I've read 2 or 3 I get puddled!
Vote vote vote!Come on folks, we don't want a voter turn out as low as that for Police Commissioners last week
Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "Topical satire, love it!"Oh yes! :-)
The "Poppies" one is curious. My story, "The Circling Song" is set in the Great War and the title comes from "The Lark Ascending" by George Meredith. Spooky.
http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/75...So far less people have voted than participated.
If you contributed you can vote...
Simon (Highwayman) wrote: "http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/75...So far less people have voted than participated..."
:-(
Read them all again. Still couldn't decide. But I did eventually. Love them all.
I'm finding the choice increasingly difficult and have a different favourite each time I read them. They are all so good!Voted (may change my mind tomorrow though).
Hard choice but I've voted.
Still a bit slow on voting but there is a battle for the top spot :http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/75...
Don't tease us Simon, you know we can't see the results til Wednesday!
Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "Don't tease us Simon, you know we can't see the results til Wednesday!"Oh dear. Really ;)
to be fair, if there's only a few votes, the battle for top spot is probably between anyone with a single vote, just trying to lurch towards garnering that second vote! :-)
Simon (Highwayman) wrote: "Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "Don't tease us Simon, you know we can't see the results til Wednesday!"Oh dear. Really ;)"
Meanie :-P
C'mon folks, 20 minutes reading during your lunchbreak, then vote!
voting is closing, still got time to squeeze in a read & vote on your favourite
Bumping to get above a locked sin thread!VOTE VOTE VOTE!
Amazing, well done to the winner! So fess up chaps, who wrote what?
oooh that was me! "Eclipse" I mean. It was so weird, I listened to that piece of music and all I could hear was an oriental theme in it. Hence my piece. Thanks everyone who read it, proper chuffed :-)
Well done, Marc!!Mine was 'A life in reverse'.
Great pieces, everyone. :)
Jonathan wrote: "Well done, Marc!!Mine was 'A life in reverse'.
Great pieces, everyone. :)"
Have you read Martin Amis' Time's Arrow? It's a whole novel in reverse about the Holocaust.
I loved both of those! Marc, it's not so surprising it sounded oriental, the violin solos use a pentatonic scale which is the basis of a lot of oriental music too. So you heard it right after all. :-)
Marc wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "Well done, Marc!!Mine was 'A life in reverse'.
Great pieces, everyone. :)"
Have you read Martin Amis' Time's Arrow? It's a whole novel in reverse about the Holocaust."
I have it on my shelf, but I haven't read it yet. I did think of that book when writing my piece!
Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "I loved both of those! Marc, it's not so surprising it sounded oriental, the violin solos use a pentatonic scale which is the basis of a lot of oriental music too. So you heard it right after all. :-)"wow, thanks for telling me. I know nothing about Classical Music being a fan of instruments you plug in to amps that go up to 11!
Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "I loved both of those! Marc, it's not so surprising it sounded oriental, the violin solos use a pentatonic scale which is the basis of a lot of oriental music too. So you heard it right after all. :-)"Thanks, Jenny. I enjoyed them all. Did you enter one this time?
Mine was Poppies, which rather bombed out! I voted for a life in reverse which was brilliant, but so were several others so it was a tough choice.Marc, music is kinda my thing and I can be a bit of a geek about it I'm afraid! I always say I like pretty much any genre except country and western.
Congratulations Marc! I voted Eclipse.Difficult choice though as they were all excellent.
I though All Change was very lovely too
Congratulations Marc! I swithered between yours and All Change, which I voted for in the end.Mine was Responsibility. I am incapable of taking things seriously :0)
Congratulations Marc! Rosemary, mine was All Change, and I voted for Responsibility! :D
Jenny (Border Dweller) wrote: "Mine was Poppies, which rather bombed out! I voted for a life in reverse which was brilliant, but so were several others so it was a tough choice.Marc, music is kinda my thing and I can be a bit ..."
I'm with you on C&W :-)
yay - i voted for the winner - hard choice though well done marc :)
Kath wrote: "i kinda thought it was yours too ;)"Yeah I'm told I have a certain recognisable style. Can't see it myself ... :-)
Who wrote Encore? I thought that was excellent :)
