First off, apologies for confusing you day-wise yesterday (and thanks for the alert, VP!) We are not - yet - so powerful that we can change the days of the week! Just trying to add on another day maybe, but with no luck. Here's our last message for this year. It's been fantastic working with you, and we achieved our aim in running it again this year which was to raise some well-needed money for the Kids Co. Thank you. Before we go though, we will be emailing the writer of our favourite message before Christmas - this isn't necessarily the 'best' message, or the 'best' writer. Just our personal choice. There is some GOOD stuff here - if you want to use it elsewhere please feel free to take it down from this site (or email us if you can't) and we wish you the best of luck. Keep in touch!
30
He calls them his little worlds. With one shake, he can change everything - not just the weather but the way their stories end. He lines them up. Which one today?
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I shook the globe and the church steeple fell off. At once, tiny people ran out of their houses and pointed in consternation at the weathercock flying over the town.
ReplyDeleteHe thinks they stay on the page, in the stories he concocts. But they come to life, to haunt him, demand better endings. He doesn’t own them, they possess him.
ReplyDeleteMilkshake Monday in school, the softness of Miss Carson's mouth. Queueing, Anthony Andrews behind me, with scissors, cuts off a wisp of my red hair. Miss Carson makes him wait.
ReplyDeletedebbiemrgn123@yahoo.co.uk
Thanks to Sarah & Lynne for a great project. Thanks to everyone who has posted, I've loved reading them this month. Good luck!
ReplyDeletedebbiemrgn123@yahoo.co.uk
The mini folk huddle in the ruins of their erstwhile church. Then five approach the curving glass wall and make gestures. They are trying to negotiate with me. So sweet.
ReplyDeleteCurved glass
ReplyDeletefocuses the sun
on tiny plastic Frenchmen.
The Eiffel Tower
wilts
under heated water.
Mock Parisians
wish for a coating
of dust
to protect them
from summer’s onslaught
My friend Mandy, she’s dead now, said she thought TH White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose was all about power and cruelty. The cruelty of adults to children. Of children to Lilliputians.
ReplyDeleteAs man’s meticulous plans,
ReplyDeleteAlmighty’s decisions mismatch,
I started with poem of thirty words,
ended up with narration of hundred
lines, began with my tale, ended
in her confounding story.
SHAKEN A LITTLE TOO HARD
ReplyDeleteHe’s been collecting them since he was a child. Bought as Christmas presents first. Then holiday bring-backs and school fete finds and comic book trades with kids in the playground.
‘I saw this and thought of you.’
And all his friends thinking the same, then and still, and snow globes on shelves in every room in his house. It is a quirk and the girls think it sweet and strange, both at the same time, this child in the man.
‘This is my favourite,’ he says. And he picks one up at random and shakes it, only a little. The snow flakes spin in the liquid air, then slow-settle back onto the church and the people.
‘Can I?’ she says, reaching out one hand.
And he says she can, though he worries she might drop it, or shake too hard. The steeple broke once before and the people no longer trust the weather that can blow, sudden as snapped fingers, in their glass ceilinged world.
In one he has let the water drain away. That’s not quite true; he threw it at the wall, god-like in his petulant wrath. And the people walk unsteadily around in drifts of white plastic and there’s a crack in their sky.
‘I love it,’ she says, not giving it back.
She leans in, kisses him slow, one hand flat to his cheek. His thoughts are all shaken, like snow-globe snow.
‘I do love it,’ she says.
He thinks she means she loves him and lets her keep what she has.
Later, in the slow settling of his thoughts, he sees the girl is gone and the church and the people gone too, a circle in the dust on a shelf where they once were. And then it is his favourite and he misses it.
Then he saw
ReplyDeletethe glass snow globe-
Christmas nineteen sixty five-
mother in the kitchen
father stoking the fire
homely smells
invaded
his lonely thoughts-
some things cannot be changed.
echulme@hotmail.com
Thanks for the mention! I've thoroughly enjoyed my month here, especially reading everyone else's efforts. It's been so much better than the creative writing course I've been attending locally. And no, this is not a shameless effort to sway the judges - it's what I think! Good luck to eveyone and here's my final effort:
ReplyDeleteMy nephew often lives in his own little world and whispers conspiratorily to his special companion. My niece teases him mercilessly. He emerges from his reverie shaken but not stirred.
My ebook reader has a fault. When I shake it, the words scramble. A new book appears from the old. And each time the book is better than the last.
ReplyDelete[COMMENT] I haven't started yet, this is a comment! I know the 30 worder that follows has nothing to do with the prompt, but it came to me out of the blue, and I've been waiting for a prompt about cats or technology and never had one. So here it is anyway: [/COMMENT]
ReplyDeleteMy new inkjet printer was a cat in a previous life. After a task you can hear it preening, cleaning electronic whiskers. And it never does exactly what it’s told.
Sometimes, when she wanted to take her time over choosing, she would run her best feather duster along the shelves, although it was rarely out of necessity. Marilyn had always loved books and her most treasured, Through the Looking Glass, sat at one end, its spine so tattered that the mottled orange cover was only visible from an angle over the top of the adult-sized books. She loved the way the corners had worn into rounded triangles, that she could push them backwards and forwards whilst she was reading, savouring their velvety texture. She marvelled at its physicality; both the cover of her copy and its narrative had resisted the conventions of time in her monotonous exterior world.
ReplyDeleteMarilyn gazed into her mirror. She chatted to Lewis Carroll about existential matters and she felt that he had encouraged her to explore ideas beyond those discussed by her dull colleagues. He understood her perfectly and she admired his brilliance. They talked about such esoterica as Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, the technicalities of cloning, the changes in time and spatial directions as a plot device and lastly, chess. She'd never played chess because she was always alone with her books.
A skilful listener, Lewis wanted her to feel whole, to prevent the type of fragmented absurdity that had dominated his books. Knowing the value she placed upon literature, he hatched a plan.
He told her to put Through The Looking Glass next to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on the bookshelf and to resist analysing any themes and mirror images created by this juxtaposition. Next, she should write herself into the real story – not the daft one with dead authors - using free association and behold the transformation. He told her that the dust would settle in no time at all.
The smug one on the left and...yes… the pretty one wearing a frock of imperial purple. They would be the protagonists in an epic of deceit and unripe fruit.
ReplyDeleteHe calls them his little worlds. With one shake, he can change everything - not just the weather but the way their stories end. He lines them up. Which one today?
ReplyDeleteHe picks a person in the crowd and weaves them into his story, imagining things that they might be. It’s like having a little in-joke with himself, because he never gives much indication to the person that they are part of his song, but for a second maybe he might catch their eye and imagine that they have connected in some way for a blinking moment.
Standing in the middle of Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, he is a regular figure and is able to make a decent supplement to his living each Saturday. At the end of every day he comes back home and replays his tape recorder to listen to the songs and the lyrics that he has crafted that day. His “set” is different every time. Every so often a lyric will jump back out at him and he will remember the face of the woman who prompted it or the man that had a face that opened a world of imagined stories. Some lyrics are forgotten never to repeated, but a few get written down in his notebook. Sometimes the character stays with him for days, weeks even , evolving into a more rounded three dimensional character and he writes more songs about them, and their imagined lives.
This is what happened when he saw Christie. One day a face, and then a lyric, the next day a song, and over months a real living person with a complete songbook. His Magnum Opus.
Back on the street months later Christie appeared again, standing in front of him in the crowd.
“I know you” he said, involuntarily aloud.
Nobody actually knew him. He adapted his persona to suit each individual.
ReplyDeleteNo, he wasn’t a liar; just slipped easily from one world into another, his feet rarely touching ground.
He made the gardener forget his planting and the chef discard his recipes so that the ingredients for the evening meal had an exotic scent of rose petal and pine.
ReplyDeleteHE CAN’T CHANGE HOW THE STORIES END
ReplyDeleteHe writes. Stories, with people he recognizes not getting the girl. And the snow-globe snow of his words spinning spinning into shapes his readers think he controls. But his attention is elsewhere, when he writes. On the keys, looking for the letters to hit, and they hide from him sometimes.
‘You make them up, give them life and put words in their mouths. That’s what you do. You must know how their stories end, and can change them if you want.’
That’s what the girl says, the one he has chosen to sit beside today, the one listening to his explanation of how it is.
‘They’re in my head,’ he says. ‘How they got there I do not know. And they have their own words, whispers, like the hum of insects in my ears.’
She laughs. It doesn’t get much better than that, he thinks, sitting beside a girl and she laughs. Maybe this time something will be different.
‘It’s like a little world inside me,’ he tells her, ‘a hundred little worlds, and I simply find the words to tell you about them.’
‘Go on then. Find the words.’
But he can’t. Not like that, not to order, not speaking the words. That’s not how it works. He opens his computer and begins typing.
‘She was called Frances, and she sat alone, as though she was waiting for someone, waiting for him. He sat down beside her. Said, ‘Hello.’ Simply that. She asked him what was in the bag he carried. ‘Stories,’ he said, ‘I’m a writer.’ Frances leaned into him. ‘Will you write about me one day?’ she asked. He nodded. She laughed. It doesn’t get much better than that, sitting beside a girl and she laughs.’
He looks up from his writing. But the girl has gone.
Little worlds made of thirty words. In one month they created a universe. Now Lynne and Sarah must choose a winner. They line them up, shake their heads: “WHICH ONE?”
ReplyDeletemissec99@yahoo.com
After the meteor hit, a tidal wave flooded the Earth.
ReplyDeleteWhat remained of Humanity shook its collective fist at the sky. “But you promised!”
"Ah..." said God. "You were listening.”
A mischievous elf he stole THE. At first nobody cared, having taken ‘THE’ for granted - until they realised they could not find the dawn, the dream, the one, the end.
ReplyDeleteMartin
Happiness, Wealth, Wisdom, Beauty: she cups the pills in her palm; must chose only one. One gulp and her destiny will be decided. She shakes them. Leaves it to fate.
ReplyDeleteHe touches the glass lightly. The snow falls inside the globe, a little world he cannot enter. He hears them fighting again and shakes the snow globe. Snow erases all.
ReplyDeleteJamieson Wolf
jamiesonwolf@gmail.com
Deciding, he eyed the most precious, the rarest of all. The Butterfly, set alone as if in mid-flight, it was the most delicate, one shake, one flap of a wing...
ReplyDeleteredjim99
jimbarron@walkauvergne.co.uk
He'd had enough
ReplyDeletetime for a change
he would move everything
today-
furniture, accessories,
toys, pets,
in no time at all
he'd created
the perfect world
in his doll's house.
echulme@hotmail.com
Gerry said;
ReplyDeleteGirls, all shapes and sizes; drawing boards, bags, bursting with paints, brushes, boxes of charcoal and pens.
Grabbing easels and donkeys.
His criteria; looks, desirability, availability.
He lines them up.
“He has autism.” She says, explaining his lining up obsession. “Don’t move them.” She warns. Does he hear her? Will she ever hear him? Each in their own world. Alone.
ReplyDeleteLast pint
ReplyDeleteLast laugh
Last smile
Last barf
Last orders
Last shout
Last time
Last out
Last bus
Last on
Last stop
Last seen
Last night
Last breath
Last rites
Thanks Lynne and Sarah for a great project - it's been so enjoyable reading and writing messages. Congratulations on reaching the target too.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to keep you safe
inside a waterglobe,
showered with soft
snowflake kisses,
eyelashes glistening
the way they did
when you swam to me
through tears
with broken wishes.
It's our own little world
ReplyDeleteof wheatfield hair, wild
curly eyebrow hedgerow.
I'd wander your back forever,
not as desert or moorland,
but simply as
the kindest back I've known.
The last Sunday in November? In every town Christmas lights were being switched on, rainbow-hissing against the gloom, sparkling through the icy breath of crowds. Time for a happy ending.
ReplyDeleteI’m evicting all the little people from my snow globe. I’ve drained the weather and slapped minute yellow notices on their houses. The financial climate’s changed, I tell them, sorry.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThanks for another great 'Your Messages' - I'm going to miss it. Roll on November 2009!
ReplyDelete...........................................
He often dreamt about detention at school. Writing lines, over and over. He found a strange comfort in these dreams, in never having to worry about what to write next.
Mr Bletchley Park she nicknamed him, cockney slang for always being in the dark; over his actions, words, plans for tomorrow, oblivious of the fact the real enigma was her.
ReplyDeleteMartin
On my bathroom shelf, clothed in dust ; New York, Paris, Mont St Michel. Shake them and you dream. Smell the snow. Feel how they settle. See the landscape has changed.
ReplyDeleteHow disarmingly easy
ReplyDeleteTo manipulate at that age.
So eager to please, searching
For approval, signs of affect.
He strokes her hair, decides
To let the foehn wind blow today.
Atop the world, I scribble
ReplyDeletethis for you from Iceland.
Today, I wreaked havoc
in Reykjavik. After,
I unfroze a feast--
icicles, snowballs--
for us.
Your warmth melted my world.
I recall you shaking as I put my hands around you. I remember it was raining and the colour of your shoes. I thought I imagined that time stood still.
ReplyDeleteWhich little world will it be today?
ReplyDeleteHe chooses.
'Come, I'm taking you to a much better place,' he says.
It is the grieving families who feel they have died.
For him: I adjust my life, I make excuses, I smooth the path, I disperse anger, understand his new persona – make sacrifices. He shakes his snow-globe and my world changes.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline Smith
shaken, not stirred
ReplyDeletein his 8th year
he realized his dreams
if put in his mother's martini shaker
every morning
would boldly take him where no one had gone before
oops sorry
ReplyDeleteBeth Patterson
beth@virtualteahouse.com
To be or not to be?
ReplyDeleteLands End or Innisfree?
Archangels in the sky
As the horseman passes by?
Are there words enough to cover
The moment when it’s over?