100 Words: The Physical

When I joined the army I got a physical examination right at the start- we all did, all the new privates lined up together and displayed their own privates for inspection.  Not much fun but one thing did happen to lighten the mood.

The guy next to me had quite a large one and the doctor, upon seeing this, took out his pencil and lifted it for examination, clearly amazed at the size.

“Blimey,” he said, “I bet this fella’s been out of his cage a few times.”

“Aye,” replied the recruit, “But he’s never been on a perch before.”

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Written for 100 Word Challenge #403 on Velvet Verbosity; the prompt was the word Perched.

≤140 Characters, or Tweet Repeat: 18

The Dark Warrior's Triangle of Darkness strategem was flawless. Endless troops hot from the Underearth gave him invincibility in numbers.

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Note: I stole the Triangle of Darkness idea from the Second World War- more specifically from an IWM Interview that I catalogued (see Content Description).

250 Words: Book immersion

I get lost continuously in the worlds created in my mind by the shapes made by ink on paper.  Like Alice crawling down the rabbit hole I enter wonderland after wonderland immersing myself wholly in these strange new worlds.

Even when I have marked and closed the books, my brain carries on, pretending I’m doing something like wandering around a misty moor dressed like it’s more than a hundred years ago or walking the streets of Victorian London dodging pickpockets and shady characters.

I go too far, though, the emotional cost draining me entirely so that it is some time before I can carry on to another book and put myself through the mill again, the issues rolling through my mind and not letting me get on with my own life as I worry about the characters and what will happen to them next.  I even changed my name to Jane hoping Mr Rochester would come to call.

Escaping from Vienna, distanced from my family by space and age, it is probably not surprising I opt for this bubble existence, these escapist fantasies; especially in these beautiful surroundings that cause the mind to dream.  Real life keeps letting me down, after all, while books can’t let me down, they can only transport me to places still full of trials and tribulations, but ones that are normally resolved and don’t drag on with no end in sight.  Even if these worlds do stay with me too long they still complete me.

250 Words: One line

One line smudged by dots across the treeless landscape.  Gassed and left upon the dust to become one with it.  Hate breeds death once more and the earth weeps.  The need for control falls upon a people like a fist onto a desk and changes everything.

One line trudges.  One line displaced.  One line shuffles onward with heavy feet like stones working through the mud.  Behind lies everything.  Everything has passed.  Ahead lies anything. Anything is now desirable.  And, in one line, they are not alone.  And perhaps that will be the key. 

For where there is life there is hope.  Even displaced to foreign lands one line, huddled and massed, can carry on in hope of return to a land healed and regrown.  To return to homes abandoned and dilapidated, to be restored and renewed to a former glory of civilisation whose lungs were asphyxiated. 

One line drawn around them, imprisoning in one lump the survivors.  New homes that would be alien to anyone.  Reliant on the care of others.  Where there is life there is hope.  A forced migration is unwelcome but it is better than death.  Survival is the finest form of resistance.  If, as one line, they can survive then the mustachioed man has not won, cannot win.

Yet one line lives on in limbo.  Unable to really live until their lives are restored.  Hope there may be, alone they are not, but without outside help they are stuck in makeshift homes in a foreign land.

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Note: Inspired by an art exhibition held at the Imperial War Museum in 2008 called Displaced by the artist Osman Ahmed which is reported on here and here with videos here.

250 Words: She made me burn the letters page by page

We met by moonlight and sat on the swings talking all evening.  We never even kissed, it was so innocent. We were kids.  I was twelve years old.

He would leave me letters in a box buried under a large stone in the flower beds.  The smell of lavender still takes me back to those months of happiness.  We would write of our hopes and dreams, funny incidents occurring at our respective schools- all those things we would otherwise talk about on our swings.

I would write on lavender paper, sprayed with rosewater.  He on white watermarked writing paper.  I kept my bounty of paper, tied with red ribbon, under my pillow by night and under the floorboards by day. 

Until the day my mother found us together sat holding hands on our swings for what would be the last time and dragged me kicking and screaming back to the house to cleanse me of him.

She wouldn’t listen to my pleas.  He was sixteen and she wouldn’t believe in our innocence, claiming he was after our money.

The tears burned my face as his words blackened and crumbled to ash.  My hands felt dead, like someone else’s, as they fed each leaf to the flames against their own will.

I could barely see as she forced us to say goodbye and packed me off to boarding school.  My rosy worldview shattered for the first and last time.  I soon became hardened, having taken the first step through my metamorphosis.

250 Words: Mourning youth

Bent completely at the knee and hip, naked, hair tied in a bun, her face buried in wet palms, youth mourns before a plain wooden cross in a bleak, pitted landscape.

No comfort can be found in this age of boys driven to death among those waterlogged craters.  And so she weeps into her hands for those lost and those still to be lost- all of her kin, her generation sent to a hell of bullets cracking, shells exploding and mud mixed with blood- acres of it like a million football fields with the players churned into the surface.

No glory can be seen in charging forward with your friends and neighbours into a degrading fight to the death with your European cousins, lungs choking on gas, deflated by hot flying piercings.  She wails as she sees and feels this, every casualty scared as the light in their eyes flickers and dies.  Their name added to the list, a mason ready to chip it into white stone.

No future is clear for these youths whose youth is sacrificed for a greater good by the old with their old values: two parallel lines of handshakes turned skeletal, running forward to bash together the skulls of the fleshy.  Many will see youth mourn above them as worms crawl through their body and those left behind gain the emptiness inside that accompanies the death of a loved one.

In an empty landscape youth mourns, her generation struck down by a very human disease.

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Inspired by the painting Youth Mourning by George Clausen. Also here.