100 Word Stories: a tale about a tail

It’s a steady thump, a heartbeat. Maybe muffled by the living room carpet, Dane’s body glued to his latest computer game but carefully not moving his chair so he doesn’t run over the dog. Maybe louder on the kitchen’s wooden floor as I race around making dinner and accidentally on purpose dropping bacon scraps. A damp nose pushed into your hand, a warm, heavy weight on your feet in winter.


Or it was. Dane looks up, abandoning his screen for long enough to ask, “When will he be back?” and wait for an answer.

“Tuesday,” I say, missing Dogger too.

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100 Word Stories: An invitation with three conditions

Green.  She hadn’t worn green in fifty years.  Not since…

The invitation seemed ridiculously expensive to her, professionally printed, and for an eighteenth birthday.  Suzannah had always been daft about her girl Chloe-Anne.  And why on earth, wear green, bring flowers and a plate with at least one green food.

Green.  Ken had said he loved her, loved the green dress.  That night, the earth had rumbled her from sleep and in the early light of morning the news had come of those miners who wouldn’t return.

Fifty years.  Was it time, now to try wearing green?  Just this once?

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100 Word Stories: Peanut butter, a llama and the police

I hate peanut butter. Mercedes wrote in her blog that her llamas love it. I suspect that llamas are much like camels and cows, unselfconsciously capable of more saliva than I want to think about.


It’s hard not to be cranky when you come home to a broken door and find that the burglars had time and better taste than you would hope. Not just the TV, but Aunt Lucy’s china. It’s all only stuff, I know it’s only stuff. The policeman held out my box of tissues just as my running nose and streaming eyes were getting entirely embarrassing.

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100 Word Stories: Birthday surprise

On Wednesday, the bride doll was gone. Mellie pressed her nose to the shop window, gulping a tear.


She looked everywhere. Mam chased her away from the airing cupboard, and that half-forgotten cupboard under the stairs.


“Leave it, Mellie. Stop sticky-beaking.”


But her birthday was on Friday, and they’d had baked beans for tea three times this week. Da came home late and tired, and Mam had been working extra shifts.


The birthday parcel was too small. Mellie tried to smile. Inside was a different doll, with clothes she knew her Mam had sewn, clothes like Mellie’s. A new friend.

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100 Word Stories: Rear window

Story prompt from 100 word stories blog archive (and why is it that so many of these seem to be written in anticipation of slasher/murder tales, or at least a goodly dollop of tomato sauce being involved??) was thus:

Laid up with a broken leg you look out of the rear window of your apartment and see…

I’m never here during the day, on weekdays.  Their rhythm is something I’ve never been here to notice.  The stop-start burr of the postie’s motorcycle.  Mrs Holt takes her yappy pug for a walk at eleven o’clock – I hear them in the corridor.  

But in the back garden of the next door house, under a shadesail, an older man is restoring a sixties Ford.  He has tools laid out carefully, and from what I can see of the car, much to do.  If I open the window, I think I can hear him whistling, but I don’t know the tune.

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100 Word Stories: A stroke of luck

I hate weeding.  Small weeding, the persistent stuff that you can never get rid of, onion weed and wandering jew, is no fun.  But Grandma’s vegetable garden, a single bed now when once it was an entire backyard, is one of her few pleasures.  So every week, I weed it.  She sits in a garden chair, behind the big old house that’s now a nursing home, and points out what I’ve missed.

But then we slice a fragrant tomato, warm from the sun, and I understand why it’s worth weeding, and why I’m lucky to still be fed by Gran.

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100 Word Stories: Would you just shut up?

Joe? JOEY? Why are your filthy soccer boots IN THE WASHING MACHINE?

I don’t care if Max said it was a great idea. Not on top of the load of clean towels, don’t you ever THINK??

AMY! Mrs Britches has another mouse. No, I’m busy in the laundry. She’s your cat, get rid of it NOW!

David? Honey? Are you still keeping an eye on dinner, I smell something burning…

All the things I have to say. No. All the things I think I have to say.

What I want to say? Love you, my dear ones. Love you lots.

100 Word Stories: Song challenge (and name the song)

I am more than sick of this nappy bucket. I grimace with green virtue; wrist-deep in tainted water, nose wrinkling, it’s not so easy. My eyes are grimy-tired. It’s a toss-up whether 3am or 5am would be my least favourite time to be up. Maybe 4am, after both the others.

Felix appears at the door. "Yuk," he says, standing there in his suit and slightly loosened tie. "Dinner?"

You preside on the kitchen bench, gumming a rattle, sometimes laughing at the silly noises your dad makes to you as he chops and stirs.

You raise me up, both of you.

More info on You Raise Me Up. Josh Groban's version would be my favourite.

100 Word Stories: Hello, I don't believe we've met...

We won’t, now. Never will, and yet we have.

The soaring notes of Handel’s Messiah, the sharp and engaging observations of Dickens, my mother’s stories about Laurence Olivier in his prime, the impact of his Henry V film in World War II. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, TS Eliot, two Bronte sisters, Blake…in this winter crowd of tourists, I engage in a literary stations of the cross, here in Poets’ Corner.

Above, the stone arches rise and meet each other. We can be astonished by words, by buildings, but in the end individual imaginations let us soar. Thank you.

100 Word Stories: Wait - He Said What?

You. Are. Kidding.

No, I’m not.

Francis Xavier Bartholomew O’Leary, if you’re making this up…

Nope, never.

Impossible.

I know. But it’s true.

He really said it?

This morning, while we were having coffee.

He doesn’t drink coffee.

Chai and coffee, know-it-all.

Except he told you first.

I’m telling you second.

Mary Margaret Therese O’Brien.

Yup.

And our Patrick?

Patrick really said it.

But I thought he hated her.

So we all thought.

And he’s promised? No going back?

No going back.

Let me get this straight. Patrick has finally agreed to claim little Tom as his?

As his son.

100 Word Stories: The Ritz

At eighty, Mrs Candley’s morning walk was rather less brisk than it had been at seventy. "Not old," she would mutter to herself, "not old"…as though somehow saying the words would make them true. She loved her little house, and its abundant garden, and the memories of Edward that were in every room.

“We live in the Ritz!” he’d say, surveying the kitchen, and the view of the vegetable garden beyond. She still grew herbs, and tomatoes, and energetic scarlet runner beans, with help from the boy next door. I’d be scared of somewhere grand, she thought. This is home.

100 Word Stories: She will be missed

Sometimes, amid a busy day at work, you need a jellybean. A shot of sugar from Julie, who keeps – kept - an open-access jar on her desk.

I finally realised that it wasn’t just the sugar, but the almost-certainty of the cheerful greeting, potent as sugar, feeding your soul.

Julie made this office work. Now I realise, as the gaps start appearing, things are left to hang, unfinished, uncaught. She knitted us all together into something we are not on our own. I wish I’d thanked her more, before she left.

The jar is now on my desk, empty, waiting.

100 Word Stories: They're never around when you need one.

Don’t get me wrong. I think teenage boys can be utterly charming and delightful, even if their legs are hollow and their capacity for inhaling food in Tardis-like proportions (where DO they put it?) is designed to keep parents poor for years. They are capable of unexpected charm to elderly female relatives (great aunts and grandmas in particular) and wonderful patience with the smallest children (turn me upside down AGAIN!). And have you ever seen how they cradle a baby, how their faces soften, and you have to be very surreptitious about how you take a photo?

JAMES??? Garbage night!

100 Word Stories: Tricksy numbers

Two husbands (ex), one current (aka darling boy).

Five children. Two mine, two step, and Bellybump.

One mother, three mothers-in-law (an inelegant oversufficiency).

Five fathers/fathers-in-law. Don’t ask. Too complicated.

Assorted siblings. Assorted sibling partners. Assorted food allergies/preferences/fussinesses (vegan, darling, but we make an exception for cow’s milk and fish. I refuse to enquire further).
All Rabbit’s friends and relations (ie. the rest of the family).

Darling boy’s work commitments. Darling children’s comings and goings to be managed with military precision. Bellybump’s morning contribution to my health and welfare (Still queasy? says current MIL in That Tone).

Two words: Family Christmas.

100 Word Stories: You're waiting for something important

It was hurting like crazy. Crazy enough for painkillers. But now, after the first couple of treatments – well, after the first one, the pain’s gone. Pretty much. Needle-fine files have dug in there, it’s the first ever time I’ve spent so long in a dentist’s chair that I arrived with iPod…

And now it’s a waiting game. Is there a twang, still? An ache? A small echo remaining of how it was? They won’t finish till this is gone, the nerve is gone. And so I wait, and pay attention. The root canal tango, a game of hide and seek.

100 Word Stories: There's an elf at your front door.

So, you’re an elf.
Yup.
Nice green hat.
Yup.
Cool feather.
Yeah.
Best red pants I’ve ever seen.
Yup.
Are those pointy shoes comfortable?
Nope.
Would you rather change them?
Nope.
(Is it just me, or is this conversation flagging a bit?)
So, Owen, why are you an elf today?
Not Owen. Olaf.
Ah. Olaf the Elf, yes?
Yup.
Okaaaay. what do elves do, on a fine day like today?
Eat ICECREAM!
Oh really? Why icecream?
It’s for magic.
Well, I can see how that’s handy. What sort of magic?
We make things disappear.
Like what, Olaf the Elf?
ICECREEEEEEAM!

100 Word Stories: A new god has been born/created...

Special food. Check. Special bed. Check. Special bedding for special bed. Check. Assorted toys, coloured. Check. Minimum of three instruction books, read in full. Check. Care roster. Check. Fair process for choosing a name… well, when we tried them out, Mickey was the one he answered to. Is that fair enough?

Lead, two bowls (labelled ‘food’ and ‘water’, but I suspect that’s for the literate humans, not the dawg), collar, tag, microchipping, vet appointments for shots and such.

"Oh honey," said my best beloved, surrounded by three (additional) pleading sets of eyes. "A dog will be no trouble at all."

100 Word Stories: You finally tracked down the end of that rainbow

It was a long journey. Years. Plenty of times when you weren’t paying attention, and I knew you were thinking out the myriad individual problems and discouragements involved in such a project. I admire the way you tackled them, one at a time, never downcast for long, always fired by optimism, determined and confident that this could be done, this enormous challenge.

You bought little more than a steel skeleton rusting in a paddock, and now it is a bus again, sometimes carrying people on joyrides, always bringing them joy.

Rainbow gold is such an individual thing.

Now – what’s next?

There are those who will know the inspiration for this particular story....

100 Word Stories: I'm ready!

I got my tin with everything in.

That’s good, sweetie.

I got Mr Boo.

Can’t go without your bear.

I got three books.

There are books at Auntie Lara’s house.

Like my books best.

Well, you bring them too. But maybe she’ll have some you’ll like.

I got my quilt.

Can’t go anywhere without your quilt, can you, little man?

Can I bring Fizzcat?

No, Fizzcat lives here with us. She’ll be here when you get home.

Will the baby be here when I get home?

Yes, lovey, the baby will be here.

Love you Mum.

Love you back, buddy.

100 Word Stories: missing it for the world

It’s an odd thing, how people remember where they were when. Me? No. JFK’s assassination? Too young. Man on the moon? I’ve seen it recreated in films, people gathered around televisions for flickery pictures, Neil Armstrong’s one small step speech. But ransacking my mind? Nope. Di? I remember watching the wedding on television, but where was I when the news came of the Paris car crash? Ummmm.

What do I remember? The scent of my grandmother’s hankies, and my mother’s baking, and tobacco on my father’s tweed jacket when we hugged him. My brother learning guitar. All the important things.