Drabbles

Introducing you to other worlds, different from your own, they take you on adventures. They uncover mysteries, show you new ideas and shape your soul.  You cry with them and laugh with them, cheer them on and admire them. But no matter how many times you get together there’s always something new to discover.

They’re your best friends, because they’re always there. Even if it’s been weeks, months or years, they’re only ever a page turn away.

Pluck the tattered, bound leaves from the shelf, settle in your comfy place and say hello to your friends of ink and paper.

The best times are framed.

The hard work hidden.

The effort, arguments, waiting, and walking, for those perfect shots are invisible.

One was taken on the only sunny day of the whole week away. In that picture the smiles are covering grimaces because someone forgot the picnic. And just after that photo, someone fell over and knocked out her front tooth.

For visitors the wall’s a glimpse of someone else’s life. For friends it’s full of anecdotal tales. But for the family, life on the wall is a well of memories, both bad and good, and therefore full of joy.

Life is like a journey downstream. Even when the sun shines and the scenery is green, there’s an undercurrent.

Dragged down by sorrow and anger a girl grabs a passing hand and is pulled from the river.

For one morning, she sits on a bank and watches everyone else splash about their lives. Shoulder to shoulder with her rescuer, she feels his warmth and laughs at his terrible jokes.

But time keeps flowing, and he eventually dives back into the water. 

Following, she loses sight of him.

But the hope of meeting him again, downstream, keeps her fighting the undercurrent.

Jolted awake.

It’s 3am.

Once woken, my mind whirs, like a machine without an off switch or an emergency stop!

Searching for one, I uncover the thoughts I’ve buried at the bottom of the laundry basket in my mind all day: the presentation next week, the doctor’s appointment, and that annoying builder who’s fleeced me for thousands but I still need to finish.

Other thoughts escape from the dirty laundry, like gremlins running a muck stopping me getting to sleep.

These are the stressing hours.

Having chased the fiends round and round, I finally… fall… back… to…

”Daddy!”

It’s 5:57am.

Once called Fey and later Bera-Asgre, now she’s called Wanderer and Wonderer for she thinks as she walks and talks as she sits at the end of each day.

Having tea with an old friend here, an acquaintance there or a long-lost family member she’s just discovered, she talks but never tells.

Never staying more than one night, she continues searching for what she lost.

But what she lost she’ll never find in this world. She keeps wandering and wondering, trying to be what she was before she lost what she can’t have.

She’s looking for the future she expected.

In a land ravaged by democracy, in a nation on the brink of division, a shining beacon of hope steps forward, like a Hollywood superhero, but even better looking.

“I come to unite you under one banner,” proclaims their salvation, “My banner. I offer to be the focal point for all attention and adoration.  You need fear nobody but me.

I’ll sacrifice my own choices to live in splendour and glory, so you can live equally in poverty. You’ll be brought together in your hatred of me.

This is my hour!

My time!

The era of me – your Benevolent Dictator!”

When the moon is closest to the earth, it shines so bright it obliterates all the stars, turning the night sky black as a tar.

Like the moon pulls the tide from the beach, the supermoon pulls creatures from our souls. The wondrous of this world rise from their shadowed slumbers and stalk the land in silver moonlight. For one night they dance and revel in a world of glittering grey.

There we find our true selves and our true partners. There I met you.  

But with the rise of the golden sun it all became just a fantastic dream.

“I’d be a unicorn,” says Arabella.

“Unicorns aren’t real,” says her big brother Henry.

“Neither are dinosaurs!”

“Yes, they are, they’re just extinct. Unicorns never existed in the real world.”

“Unicorns exist in my imagination.”

Listening, Mum thinks it wouldn’t be bad to be a unicorn.

To be a fantastical creature, made of pure imagination. To be glitter and sparkles and rainbows with lethal hooves and a deadly horn.  To be fast as wind, leap high as waves and soar like eagles.

What better way for Arabella to fulfil her dreams in the real world than believe in her imagination.

Sticks and stones were treasures in the forest of our childhood. They were swords and gold, light-sabres and jewels, wands and magical gems. 

Climbing trees, in the forest, we would scale mountains and building dens we would hide from ogres. We battled legions and vanquished bad guys.

With our sticks and our stones, we lived a hundred different lives.

We carried them home, spoils of war and trophies of victory and leave them lying in the boot of the car or by the side of the front door.

Eventually, they’d be cleared away to make room for the real world.

On a sunny day, a woman cavorts up the high street, music in her ears and rhythm in her stride.

A man, his ponytail swishing, stomps downhill with a smile because it’s a sunny day.

Outside the abandoned bank, a pensioner raises his hat to the lady smothering the three-seater bench.

She’s smiling indulgently at the toddler, weaving expertly along the pavement on his scooter.

It’s a sunny day.

The green man escorts a couple across the road, but the sunny day is in the driver’s eyes.  

A screech, a scrunch and screams echo round, even on a sunny day.