furious fiction – LOUISE PIEPER

Join the queue

Have you been busy? My month has whizzed past in an increasingly chilly blur, but before it skitters off entirely I thought I’d post a 500 word story I wrote at the start of the month, for the AWC’s Furious Fiction.

I’ve missed the last six of the monthly writing challenges so I was determined to do this one. The requirements were that the story had to begin in a queue, include the words cross, drop and lucky, and include a map. Err…. my mind was a perfect blank and then the only thing that entered it was…

The 17th Letter

“Don’t you think it’s ironic?”
“No,” Queenie said, “it’s really not.”
She hunched her shoulders against the wind and sighed. Two metres away, Qiana rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, but no,” Quentin insisted. He shuffled closer, hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, size 14 running shoes taking up more than a fair share of the lane’s narrow footpath. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, I do,” Queenie said. “And no, it’s not.”
She took an ostentatious step back and wished the lane had those little green crosses on the ground to mark a safe space. It was too cold to be doing the social distance dance, too cold to be waiting in this wind tunnel for one of the twins to unlock the door and start the meeting.
“But you can’t know,” he protested.
“It’s my mutant superpower,” Queenie said. “It’s what a lucky thirteen years of teaching has made me.”
“Psychic?” Doctor Quimby looked up from his book, although Queenie would have sworn he was paying no more attention to them than to the weather.
“Psychotic, maybe.” Qiana grinned.
“Three hundred and sixty-five ten-year-olds have drawn me a comprehensive road map to juvenile humour and I can predict a bad pun at –” Queenie said, but Quentin ignored her.
“Isn’t it ironic,” he said, “that we have to queue to get into the Q Support Group?”
“No,” Queenie said, “It’s typical. Qasim and Qamar are always late.”
“But –”
“And it’s only irony where the expectation is deliberately opposite to the actuality.”
“And we’re not really queued,” Qiana said. “More… clustered.”
She edged away from Quentin with a smile that wouldn’t have embarrassed a shark.
“It is, technically, a queue of Qs,” the doctor conceded.
“A tautology then.” Queenie shrugged. “But a tautology with an irony deficiency.”
She straightened as someone stopped at the end of the lane. Bundled and bulky in a heavy coat and scarf, she couldn’t make out any of their features. Their glasses reflected the streetlights as they scanned the lane and then started forward.
“Newbie,” she murmured.
“Conspiracy theorist?” Qiana suggested. “Like the last four?”
“Or a James Bond fan,” Doctor Quimby said, “looking for Q Division.”
Both were more likely than a genuine member. Few peoples’ names started with Q and even fewer wanted to socialise with others who shared that burden. Qasim was probably right: ‘support group’ sounded too needy, but they’d voted down Quentin’s suggestion to rename the group ‘Q Tips’.
“Are you the Q people?” The figure stopped a considerate distance away and took off the glasses, revealing an elderly Chinese face. “I am Qiang.”
“Hi.” Queenie smiled. “We’re just waiting for the key.”
“Ah, unfortunate. It’s this wind.” He shuddered. “I really need to…”
He stopped, blushing.
Queenie raised her hand.
“Don’t say it,” she warned, but Quentin ignored her.
“You know what the alphabet says: you’ve got to P before you Q.”

And there you have it – flash fiction, or really just a smidgen of juvenile humour, to close out the month.

Sorry.

My nice banner image of a queue is a free to use StockSnap from Pixabay.

Meet the wife

Wife is one of those words which we think we understand, but it can surprise us.

Hmmm, perhaps I’ll leave that alone and move on…

At its root, wife just means ‘woman’ rather than ‘female spouse’ which solves my childhood puzzlement over how a housewife could be married to a house. It also makes sense of midwife, once you realise the ‘mid’ is the Middle English word for with, so it’s a woman who was with the mother during labour.

Likewise, there was no marriage required for Medieval jobs like alewife and fishwife to apply. The Old English name for a mermaid was merewif – a woman of the sea. I can’t help but feel that making them maids – young and innocent – rather than wives, diminished them somewhat.

One of my favourite ‘wife’ roles is the henwife. Objectively, she’s a woman who keeps domestic fowl. In folklore and fiction, she is more likely a witch or wise woman. I recommend author Terri Windling’s post on Hen Wives, Spinsters and Lolly Willowes.

I recently reread Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, which Windling quotes in her post. It’s an extraordinarily subversive book for its time (1926) and, I think, still resonant now.

All of which is a very long explanation of where my inspiration came from for my entry in this month’s AWC’s Furious Fiction writing challenge.

It had to be a <500 word story, written in 55 hours which:

included someone/something being caught.
included the words OBJECT, WOUND, BAND, ELABORATE (plurals allowed).
had as the final two words THE MOON.

And I thought… if you can have a henwife, why not…

The Eggwife

“You keep day-dreaming,” my father said, “you’ll get caught by the eggwife.”

“Not me.” I grinned which made Pa scowl.

“Caught and kept. It’s not like you could run.”

My smile froze, lips stretched across my teeth, tight as the jagged skin around my leg where flesh and muscle had been torn and devoured.

Pa told me every day how lucky I was to have survived.

“Why would she want me?” I whispered, but he heard and wheezed a bitter laugh.

“She’s not fussy,” he said.

Could she be so easily pleased to want me? No-one else did.

Not the girls who played their elaborate skip rope games in the square, side glances scorching me as they clapped and sang:

Hoppity skit, hoppity skit,

The eggwife is coming, lickety spit.

Hooked by a song or caught by a smell,

The eggwife will trap you inside of her shell.

Not their mothers who clenched their hands into the sign against evil as I passed by.

Not even Pa, who couldn’t forgive that I had lived when Ma had been eaten by the wolf.

Small wonder, then, that I went looking for the eggwife.

I waited until Pa had sloped off to the pub before I took my stick and left the house. I wasn’t sure which would be worse; if he did object to my going, or if he did not.

With every step, a tighter band of pain wrapped my leg. I shivered as the full moon rose, glowing like the bright eye of a great and hungry beast. The night was thick with scurrying claws and the rush of dark wings and the moaning of the wind in the trees. Tears blinded me when I finally reached the crossroads.

“Eggwife!” I cried. “Will you take me, eggwife?”

A figure stepped into the moonlight, cloaked in dark feathers, with a black chicken held close to her side. I could not see her face, only the shadows beneath her hood.

“Why should I, child?” she said.

I wanted to sink to the ground, but I forced myself to clutch my stick and answer her.

“They say you can catch us with a scent or a song, can tuck us inside one of your eggs, and I thought…”

She nodded and stroked the chicken’s feathery breast with one bony finger.

“I thought there would be no pain inside an egg.”

“No child,” she said, “should bear such pain.”

She bent and grabbed my old wound, above the knee where the lancing agony was worst. I opened my mouth to scream and gasped instead as the pain vanished.

She straightened and held out a yellowed wolf’s fang.

“A gift,” she said.

As I took it a shudder passed over me, like a wave of warm water, like the scent of wild honey. I grew fur and fangs and four legs that were straight and strong.

I raised by head and sang to the moon.

Banner image is cropped from a photo by Алина Осипова from Pixabay.

Rocking that dress

Wake of a boat - image from AWC September writing challenge

With a writing prompt like that picture, you’d think it would all be clear sailing, right? Well, maybe it’s been too long since I had a holiday but I couldn’t conjure blue skies and an idyllic ocean. Instead, I wrote something which valiantly tries to put the fun back in funeral.

As it turned out, that was fine.

While my persistence hasn’t actually paid off – I did not, after all, win the cash prize – I am pleased to say that my 22nd entry into the monthly Furious Fiction challenge from the Australian Writers’ Centre did manage to get longlisted.

The challenge for September was to write <500 words in 55 hours, inspired by the boat image, with a first word that began with the letters SHO, and included the words SCORE, SLICE, SPRINKLE, STAMP and SWITCH (or plural or past tense variations).

Here’s mine:

That Dress

“Shoddy coffin.”

For one awful moment Chloe thinks Liam’s going to rap his knuckles on the wood in the funeral equivalent of kicking a car’s tyres while you’re talking the salesman down.

He leans closer to the corpse, frowning.

“Reckon Bec remembered to switch Auntie Maeve’s diamonds for paste? These are pretty bling.”

She nudges his elbow.

“Respect, Liam, we’re supposed to be paying our respects.”

He shrugs. “Chill, love, Auntie Maeve won’t mind.”

Her black high heels pinch her toes as she tries to think of something nice to say about his great-aunt other than that the old lady made a great pavlova.

“Is that the same outfit she wore to our wedding?” Liam says.

Chloe has been trying not to look at the body. It seems indecent, somehow, to have the top half of the coffin propped open. She’s only been to two other funerals and in one the coffin was so covered in flowers you could have mistaken it for a florist’s counter. The other was a memorial service, with just a portrait on an easel.

She lets her gaze slide up the side of the admittedly cheap-looking pine box, glance over the ruched satin lining and bounce off a slice of turquoise blue dress just visible under a bouquet of lilies. She takes in the other details in a rapid series of ocular jerks, like she’s playing a macabre game of pinball and doesn’t want to raise her eyes to see how close she is to the high score.

Or, in this case, to another glimpse of Auntie Maeve’s unnatural, lurid make-up.

“Yes, same outfit.”

Chloe reminds herself not to speak ill of the dead, especially when you’re right next to them.

Liam shakes his head.

“The one that looked like she’d just tangoed off the set of ‘Dancing with the Stars’?” he says. The sides of his mouth hitch up. “The backless one?”

“That one,” Chloe growls, since no bride wants to have her wedding dress upstaged by their groom’s octogenarian great-aunt, but no-one had known that Auntie Maeve had celebrated her eightieth birthday by getting a tramp stamp tattoo… until she wore that dress.

Liam grins and starts waving his hands around.

“Seriously? With the plunging neckline and the big frothy white fishtail flounces, and the faux pearls sprinkled all over it? How did they fit the damn thing into the coffin?”

Chloe swats one of his hands and says, “Don’t be mean. She said it reminded her of cruising the Greek islands: the blue ocean, the white foam behind the ship.”

“Perfect dress for a wake then,” he says and laughs.

The play’s the thing

The line between comedy and tragedy can be pretty thin and my latest piece of flash fiction crosses it. I’m not entirely convinced that’s a good idea in a story of less than 500 words. But I’m hopeful that the foibles of the fascinating world of theatre, particularly at the amateur dramatics end of things, are well enough known that the comedic aspects don’t need explaining.

And the tragedy?

Well, ghosts have been part of human folklore since antiquity, so I don’t think that needs too much explaining either, especially in relation to Shakespeare.

* and speaking of Shakespeare, that banner image is cropped from a photo I took of the Zombie Macbeth cast promoting their show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006 *

There were three requirements for the AWC’s May Furious Fiction challenge:
1. The first word had to be ‘five’,
2. Something had to be replaced, and
3. The words ‘the/a silver lining’ had to be included.

You can follow the link to find the winning and shortlisted entries and to sign up for notification of the competition, which happens on the first weekend of each month: you’ll have 55 hours to write a <500 word story that meets the criteria announced at 5pm on Friday. It’s a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy Shakespeare and Spirits:

“Five fathoms deep thy father lies –”
“It’s not –” Avita said and Zoe grabbed her arm.
“I’ll just stop you there a moment, er….” She checked her clipboard. “Miles.”
On stage, the actor frowned and peered at them across the lights.
“Is there a problem?”
“It’s ‘Full fathom five’,” Avita said.
“What?”
“Just a couple of things, Miles, sorry to break in so early,” Zoe said, hushing her assistant. “Avita’s right, though, Ariel’s song starts ‘Full fathom five’.”
“Well,” he huffed. “I think I caught the gist of it.”
“Yes, but Shakespeare –”
“I mean,” he went on, “there’s alliteration and then there’s just showing off. Anyway, if you insist.”
He flung out his right arm and declaimed, “Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones –”
“Miles!” Zoe pinched the skin between her eyes where a headache had wormed its way into her skull. Seven auditions and this was the last.
“What?” said the actor.
“We’re not auditioning for Ariel,” Zoe said.
“Yes, but –”
She spoke over his protest.
“In fact, we’re not auditioning for The Tempest.”
“I know that,” he said. “But you can’t expect me to read from the Scottish play.”
“But we’re auditioning for the Scottish play,” Zoe said, looking away from Avita whose jaw had dropped in disbelief. “We urgently need another Banquo.”
“And why is that?” he demanded. “Because the curse of the Scottish play fell upon you.”
Avita’s mouth snapped shut and she surged to her feet. Zoe caught her wrist.
“Our Banquo died of a heart attack during dress rehearsal,” Zoe said. “There’s no curse.”
“I think you’ll find,” the actor said, putting his hands on his hips. “that the curse is very well documented.”
Zoe released Avita’s wrist and let her stalk towards the stage steps.
“Yeah, well, thanks for your time today, Mr Carr,” Avita said. “I’ll just see you out.”
As her assistant bundled him off stage, Zoe repeated, softly, “There’s no curse.”
“What, can the devil speak true?”
Her head jerked up. There were no more auditions…
Something flickered like a figure in an old black and white news reel beside the curtains to the downstage wings. Dressed for the first act, their Banquo stood on the spot where he’d died.
“Connor?” Zoe said.
“All’s well.” He lifted his pale gaze to her. “I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters…”
Light caught the edge of his tunic, a silver lining that flared like touchpaper and consumed his strangely celluloid image. Zoe shook her head. A ghost.
She didn’t believe in ghosts.
“Unbelievable,” Avita said, coming back onto the stage. “That’s all of them gone. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know about you,” Zoe said, “but I really need a drink.”

Better not go alone

You know it’s lovely down in the woods but sometimes it can get a little creepy. That’s what happened with the March Furious Fiction writing challenge of ‘person, place, object’. Simple right? Our <500 word stories had to include a character in disguise and a mirror, and take place in a park.

National park, dog park, business park, car park, amusement park – there were plenty of options, and stories are all about choices. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

You can follow that link to read this month’s winning and shortlisted stories, and you can join in the fun this coming Friday (3 April) when the AWC will issue a new challenge at 5pm for a weekend of furious writing.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy my tale of an ultimately delicious walk in the park:

The Dead Zone
You slip through the hole in the fence half an hour after sunset.
I’m waiting by the gate, hidden by the twilight and the camouflaging shadows of signs that shout ‘keep out’ in seven languages. The weeds are waist-high and my shirt is the same colour as the rusted links of the padlocked chain. I watch your face as you take in the ivy-draped guard hut, the cracked bitumen where trees have reclaimed the road, the blistered husk of an old telephone booth.
Your eyes shine with the illicit thrill of doing the forbidden.
“Hallo, kleiner Leuchtkäfer,” I say.
You startle like a deer, but you don’t lose your smile when you see me. I like that.
“What did you say?” Your accent is as broad as the wide country you call home.
“I welcomed you in, little firefly.” I thread through the weeds towards you. You weigh my size, gender, clothes and age with a glance, and I see the moment when you decide I’m not a threat but an opportunity. Your smile grows brighter.
“Are there fireflies?” you ask. “I read online there’s all kinds of animals.”
I wave my hand at the devouring wilderness, as if I have conjured it.
“All kinds,” I agree. “The fireflies are best near the pond.”
You tap your phone to bring up an aerial photograph of the site. I move closer, pretending to peer at it, but I want to breathe in your scent.
“There’s supposed to be a tower,” you say. “I want to camp there and watch for wolves.”
You name the predators with reverence and I allow myself a smile.
“There is a watchtower.” I start to walk as if I will take you there and you pace beside me, gesturing with the hand not snapping images of saplings growing through ruined cars, faded graffiti on crumbling concrete, squirrels chastising us from the illusory safety of their trees.
“I knew it’d be good,” you say, “but this is amazing. Are there still landmines?”
“Oh, yes,” I say and you move closer. “It is one reason they warn people to keep out.”
“But they don’t. Tourists. Locals.” You flick a glance at me as I lead us into a narrow lane between derelict cottages. “They call them stalkers at Chernobyl.”
“I am not a stalker,” I say, “and there is no poison here, only the demilitarised zone.”
“It’s still an exclusion zone, a dead zone,” you say and I almost laugh.
“An involuntary park,” I murmur. “It had no choice.”
You do laugh at that.
The fireflies I promised are mirrored in the dark water of the pond. You tap and tap, capturing their beauty. Then you hold your phone at arm’s length and sling your other arm around my shoulders, drawing me close for a selfie.
“Smile,” you say and I bare my teeth although, of course, you are alone on the screen of your phone.

(Banner cropped from an image by Iva Balk from Pixabay)

On guard, and time for fury!

photo of an alert dog Another month, another Furious Fiction.

Today’s post is a two-edged sword – one side shares the 500 word story I wrote for February’s AWC Furious Fiction Challenge, and the second (the sharper side and call to action) is to tell you that today, at 5pm, the AWC will unveil their March challenge. You’ll have 55 hours to craft your own tale to meet whatever fiendish criteria they propose – and be in the running to win $500. Come on, it’ll be fun.

Meanwhile, here’s my take on February’s requirements for some sort of guard in the story, inclusion of the words narrow, golden, leathery and glossy, and the first and last sentences each to contain just two words:

RESCUE
Bad day. You make it to the couch. Cue brass band and medal ceremony. Achievement get. Level up.
You make it to the couch and curl around the pain like a whiskered fern frond, or one of those leathery, segmented insects you find under rotting wood. Are they slaters? You can’t remember.
The room hangs sideways. Horizontal verticals of curtains, door frame, bookcase. Improbable uprights on the tilted coffee table. You reach for a bottle of water caught between the sedimentary layers of neglect but you’re too stiff. Fossilised. Curled like an ammonite. Like the glossy, carved scroll on the neck of the violin you haven’t taken out of its case for eight months.
Cue first violin, screeching a glissando from shame to rage, a tremolo of failure.
You read online that some people don’t have an inner monologue and laughed until you couldn’t sit up, until your head was an Easter Island monolith, drenched in salty Pacific rain. For years you absorbed criticism and despair. Now the sullen echoes, a symphony in D-sharp minor, crush you into the couch.
You can just about breathe through it.
Then he’s there, coming in from the kitchen, trailing dirt prints on the carpet and the scent of basil he’s brushed against. A velvet-soft head pushes under your hand and noses your wrist. He’s so warm, like he’s swallowed the sun to bring it inside for you. His tail beats a bass drum tattoo on the couch, thunderous applause speaking joy at your company.
You breathe together.
Your fingers glide over his ears, stretch and repeat – easier than any scale you ever played. He whines softly, a melancholy oboe, just enough to remind you there’s more to the orchestra than the strings. More to the day than the couch. More to you than failure. He licks the inside of your wrist, rasping and real in a way the echo of the first violin can never be.
“That’s right,” you tell him. “You scared it.”
You make it to the front yard. There are five chewed tennis balls tucked into the big blue pot with the golden cane palm. You pick one up and he’s a dervish, ecstatic with anticipation. You throw and he flings himself after it, blurred pursuit through the narrow tangle of green.
“Nice dog,” a voice says from the gate as the ball is returned. It’s a man, kitted and capable, from the building site three doors up. “What sort is he?”
The best sort you know. Bravest and true. The sort that stands between you and despair.
“A guard dog,” you say.
“Really?” He considers the soft ears, short legs, limpid eyes.
“A rescue dog.”
“Oh, cool.” He smiles. “Nice to meet a lifesaver.”
“Yes.” You look down and meet that dark, loving gaze. “Good dog.”

(Banner cropped from an image by Hans Aldenhoven from Pixabay.)

Celebrities? Get me out of here!

gold tiles

‘A’ list, ‘B’ list, reality TV list – who can keep up? I swear I can read a list of celebrities appearing somewhere or the other and not recognise a single name. Is this something to be proud of, or a reflection that our notion of celebrity has gotten out of hand? I’m confounded by the interest in every banal detail of celebrities’ lives and by their symbiotic need to feed the beast of media ubiquity.

So why am I writing about them?

The blame can be laid at the feet of the AWC’s Furious Fiction writing challenge for November, which required <500 words in 55 hours which:

had the first and last words an anagram of each other, and
included the phrase ‘there were eleven # in the #’ and
an interpretation of five emojis (a zipped mouth, a moon, a pair of scissors, a handshake and a cobweb).

Emojis? I don’t ‘do’ emojis, darling! And then, to quote the delightful Mrs Lovett, ‘you know me, bright ideas just pop into my head’.

I hope you like my petulant celebrities, appearing now in ‘A List‘:

“Three?” Theo Fitzclarence leaned towards the show’s host and shook his head. “I wish, Max. I’m afraid there were eleven people in the marriage.”

The studio audience gasped, laughed and clapped as the host’s jaw slow-dropped in his trademark facial move.

“You mean…?”

Fitzclarence raised the hands that had played the chords that had sold a million downloads for his alt rock band, Cake Scissors, and started counting them off.

“Me. Taniya. Her stylist. Her make-up artist. Hairdresser. Personal trainer. Personal assistant. Social media assistant. Two security guards to look after Cha-Cha and Biscuit…”

“The tea-cup Pomeranians?”

“More like tea-cup terrorists.”

Laughter as the cameras zoomed in to capture Fitzclarence’s sneer.

“You think I should have included them in the count? Maybe you’re right.” The musician scraped one hand across his stubbled jaw. “It was never about us. Even when we were alone – rare as that was – Taniya would be snapping selfies and tweeting about ‘quality couple time’.” He grimaced. “Her social media adviser said she got the most re-tweets when she tagged me and the band. I was just a prop to her promotion machine.”

The audience sighed their sympathy, but the host waggled his fingers.

“Your count comes up short,” he said. “That’s only ten.”

“Only?” Fitzclarence raised a derisive eyebrow, then looked away, jaw firming, thick dark hair falling over his eyes. “I don’t think I can talk about number eleven.”

Max wriggled in his seat, eager as a puppy begging for a treat.

“Come on, Theo, I won’t tell.”

He mimed zipping his mouth closed, then batted his lashes at the close-up camera.

Fitzclarence kneaded his fist against his chest.

“Nah, man. All I can say is his name starts with a C.”

More gasps and a drawn out ‘ooooh’ from the host made the musician smirk.

“You work it out,” he said.

“I’ve never been good with puzzles.” Max played to the audience. “So I thought we’d better go straight to the source.” He flung out his arms. “Let me present – fresh from her star turn on Broadway – Ms Taniya Webb!”

The studio lights dimmed and a spotlight picked her out, seated on a dazzling crescent moon, descending from above with a rain of golden glitter. The statuesque Webb high-kicked her diamond heels and blew kisses to everyone except Fitzclarence.

“Max, darling,” she said as he helped her off the swing.

“Now, if I can’t convince you two to kiss and make up, you can at least shake hands,” he said.

Webb lifted one exquisite dark shoulder and pouted over it.

“I don’t think so, darling. Theo’s a sweet boy, but it seems he can’t quite count. I make it at least seventeen in our marriage… with his groupies.”

The audience applauded as she tapped the host’s dropped jaw closed then patted his cheek.

“I’ve just tweeted about it,” she said. “You can read all the details there.”

The anti-cupid

close up of a cat's face

Talk about a writing challenge – AWC’s Furious Fiction this month almost defeated me. Why? Because the first criteria was it had to be set in a library or bookstore and, if you read Sweet serendipity, you’d know I did that last month. Plus, you had to include at least six of their twenty words. But inspiration springs eternal and one of those words was cupid…

The other nineteen words – smelt, broken, music, grubby, around, game, coffee, mechanical, hands, beige, twelve, backpack, letters, nameless, cowboy, operate, train, pungent and untouched – are all included in my story: The Anti-Cupid.

Twelve broken hearts in an hour.

A new record.

Boris surveyed the bookstore from his perch on the counter, a faint sneer tugging at his lips. His patch, his rules and most of the lovelorn had no idea how to play the game.

Still, one couldn’t afford to rest on one’s laurels.

That was the express train to complacency station, followed by demotion and the dead-end siding of incarnational opportunities. If he didn’t watch out, he’d be back as a fly, distracting some grubby, nameless, post office sorting-room minion to ensure the love letters were misdirected.

He shuddered.

Anything but that.

‘Are you alright, Boris?’ Gwyn said and he twisted expertly away from her reaching hands, leaping to the floor and darting into the best seller aisle.

‘Boris!’ she called, but there was only so much of her pawing he could stand.

He reached the cross aisle and looked for opportunities. A middle-aged woman flicked through the journals. Two office workers gossiped next to the latest biographies of movie stars and music producers. A tall man in jeans browsed the Westerns. A student with a backpack stole curious glances at a short woman with hair the colour of wasabi, who read the blurb on a fantasy novel.

The pungent aroma of blossoming love drifted from them.

Boris sauntered forward as the student said, ‘That’s, er, that’s a good book. Have you read her Steampunk one? With the mechanical corset?’

Wasabi-girl looked up and grinned. ‘I loved that book. When they smelt the copper and Tippi injects it into the automaton and Pickerel says -’

‘“That’s not how we operate!”’ they chorused and smiled at each other.

Boris’s cold nose hit the back of the student’s leg at the same moment the green-haired girl said, ‘Want to get a coffee and talk Steampunk?’

It was hard to say which startled the student more, but she stammered agreement as they both exclaimed over what a gorgeous cat he was. Boris bunted his head against their ankles, weaving between the women’s legs in an arcane match-breaker pattern. He purred his satisfaction. They might leave together, but there was no hope for their budding romance now.

He looked around. The cowboy had abandoned the Westerns and was sidling towards the lone woman who clutched a beige Moleskine like it was her bridal bouquet.

Not today.

Not on Boris’s watch.

No-one left his bookstore untouched.

Sweet serendipity

It was a tough round of writing requirements for the AWC’s Furious Fiction challenge this month. In 500 words or less you had to include the name of at least one element from the periodic table AND the words ‘traffic’, ‘jowls’ and ‘hidden’ AND something that buzzes AND the first and last letter had to begin with an ‘s’. Phew!

Thankfully, library science came to my rescue – doesn’t it always? – and this sweetly serendipitous thing happened:

“Seriously?” Wilson glared at the librarian, smiling serenely behind a desk misleadingly labelled ‘Information’. “What sort of system is serendipitous juxtaposition?”

Her Cheshire cat smile grew wider.

“Wonderful.” She breathed rapture into each syllable.

“I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’m already late. The traffic was appalling. The car park was full. I spilled my coffee and–” He grated out the words through clenched teeth, “I need that book.”

“Then I’m glad we can help you, sir.”

“But you’re not helping. I asked where it was and you said you don’t know.”

“That’s right.” She quivered with excitement like a six-year old about to blow out her birthday candles. “I don’t know where it is.”

Wilson pinched the skin at the top of his nose, hoping to dispel the faint buzz which warned of an impending migraine. It whined on, a tiny wasp trapped in his sinuses.

“Look, miss–”

She raised her left shoulder, grimaced and jerked her head rapidly to the side. The contortion drew his attention to a name badge pinned on her collar.

“Antimony. Right. If you could just tell me–”

“How it works? I’d love to!” Antimony clasped her hands together and said, “The serendipitous juxtaposition of related texts maximises the beneficial outcome of a library user’s anticipative browsing. Browsing, of course, is the art of not knowing what you want until you find it.”

“But I do know what I want,” Wilson wailed. “I know exactly what I want!”

“One book?” Antimony shook her head. “We can’t have you leaving with just one book. The library’s cost-efficiency study discovered that the optimal rate of bibliographic consumption was seven loan items per library user, per visit. Serendipitous juxtaposition allows you to find the otherwise hidden and overlooked items which are perfect for your needs. I can give you the general shelf number to browse.”

“The general…”

Wilson’s mouth opened and closed. He knew his face was flushing, his jowls wobbling like an indignant turkey’s, the damn little wasp drilling a spike of pain into his head. He remembered the doctor’s warning at his last check-up and drew in a long, deep breath.

“Yes,” he said. “Please.”

“Wonderful.” She dragged the word out again, while she scrawled a number on a card and handed it over with a flourish. “By the stairs, sir. Enjoy your browsing”

“Thank you,” he grated out, as his right eye began to twitch.

Antimony’s smile was as wide as the sky. “I’m sure it will be satisfyingly serendipitous.”

A real fixer-upper

Librarians believe in Ranganathan’s five rules which include for every book its reader and for every reader his or her book. I don’t know if there’s a similar rule for real estate agents and houses, but one thing is for sure – it’d be very hard to write the sale blurbs for some properties.

With that in mind, here’s my 500 word story for the AWC’s Furious Fiction challenge for August. This month the requirement was to include the following adjectives: “shiny, silver”, “cold and greasy”, “scratched and weather-worn”, “sweet and pungent”, “ink-stained” and “shrill, piercing” and one of them had to be in the first line.

Fixer-upper

Screwed to the gate post are three shiny, silver numbers which make everything behind them look shabby. Unfortunately, behind them is the house I’m supposed to sell.

I hope the owner’s niece doesn’t expect a miracle.

I cram the hatchback between the lilac bush busily devouring the driveway and the scratched and weather-worn fence. The old house crouches beside a main road and its blistered, sun-ravaged face stares down the barrel of another busy street.

Bad Feng Shui.

I sigh and write off eighty-six percent of potential Asian investors right there.

Two steps from the gate and I’m nosing the warped front door.

No yard, no privacy.

Inside, the sullen curtains in the front windows cast the bedrooms into gloom. I write off ninety percent of young families, too.

Street noise, stranger danger and random, passing perverts peering through your bedroom windows.

I cross to the side window and eyeball the house next door. It’s so close you could lean out and shake hands with the neighbours. I wonder if they know what happened, if the owner’s niece contacted them, like she contacted the realty, gushing words down the phone: ‘Aunt Winnie broke her hip. She can’t live there alone. Good thing she was here when she had her fall. She’ll have to sell.’

I touch the windowsill and my fingers find scratched letters where a blister of paint has peeled back to reveal childhood’s vandalism. Winnie Warden. Miss Winifred Jane Warden. Winnie Andino. Mrs G. Andino.

Suddenly, it’s not the shrill, piercing voice of Miss Warden’s niece in my head, but Lissa’s smoky, whiskey brogue. She lounges on tangled sheets, twisting her dark hair around ink-stained fingers, telling me about Cathy and Heathcliff and doomed love.

I snatch my hand away. I don’t believe in ghosts. Or love.

I stride down the linoleum-slick hall, glancing into small, grim rooms. Bathroom. Lounge. Dining. The kitchen cabinets cluster together as if they don’t trust the Formica table or the lace-shrouded windows.

No benches, no dishwasher, no bloody hope.

I drag open the cold and greasy bolt on the back door and fight the fly-screen to get outside as fast as I can. I’m three steps down the path before the sweet and pungent scent hits me and I stop and stare at a garden paradise.

Forget the house. This I can sell.

Can I help you, love?” a voice asks.

I spin around. There’s a man standing in the rose arch between this garden and the equally gorgeous one next door. He’s old and flamboyantly camp, but he’s quick. He sees the realty logo on my shirt and asks sharply, “Is Winnie alright?”

“Who are you?” I blurt out.

“Her neighbour.” He puts out his hand. “George Andino. Tell me she’s alright.”

“She broke her hip and can’t live here alone.” I echo Miss Warden’s niece.

“She won’t be alone,” he says. “I’ve been her best friend for sixty-two years.”

Lissa was right. It’s doomed love, no sale, and a miracle.