Short Story Sunday: Looking Back

Walter stroked his forefinger against the ridge of his thumbnail. The naked glare of the lightbulb cast shadows as it swayed above the kitchen table. It exaggerated his wife's expression. He thought about leaving. He imagined the sound of the chair scraping the floor, the gape of his daughter's expression as he walked out and the pause before she started her litany of why he was a bad father. It felt as though the walls might close in on them. No. On him. The pressure on his chest morphed into sharp pains in his ribs. Something was going to explode. He stroked the gap between his eyebrows and cleared his throat.

Short Story Sunday: Human for a Day

You will meet me eventually. Sometimes we brush against each other when you take a corner on De Waal Drive in your car after a night of wine. Other times I cross your path as a postman, a shop assistant or a pensioner at a traffic light.

Short Story Sunday: Crossing Mrs Hardy

I dreaded speaking to Mrs Hardy. She never seemed to be able to look at any of my ideas without lacerating it with her red pen and telling me what she would have done or what she would have liked to see. There was so much riding on this writing project – my hopes for getting into Oxford depended on her approval. It was an open secret that because her son was the head of the faculty, he took all recommendations from her seriously. So far, I had failed to impress her. She didn’t like me. I had no idea why. I tried everything: handing in drafts for her to proof, asking for extra reading homework, volunteering as a peer tutor. Nothing seemed to change her opinion of me. She’d just look at me over the top of her spectacles with that smarmy expression at the corners of her mouth while she decimated yet another of my attempts.

“Ma’am? I have a question about our assignment.”

She was erasing poetry analysis from the whiteboard. “Speak.”

I looked at her back. “I have an idea I wanted to discuss with you. For question three? I’m thinking of submitting an essay on horses in World War I.”

Her erasing complete, she turned, her eyes on her desk. “Go on.” She began stacking papers and neatening the piles of books.

“I think I’d like to look at the equestrian side of war, ma’am. Ten million horses died and I wonder how the war would have been different without them.”

“What a pointless essay topic. If they didn’t use horses then it probably would’ve been oxen, mules or donkeys. Have you given this any thought at all, Eliza?”

She never looked at me. Not once. Bitch. “Ma’am, I think it would make for an interesting...”
“You keep saying ‘I think’, but there’s little evidence to support that. Honestly, you overestimate your chances of being a success in life unless you start.”

I began to shake and felt my nails piercing the leather of my binder. “With all due respect, I think you are wrong.”

That did it. She looked up, her stacked tyre neck tinged red.

“Might I remind you that my status in this school and in the intellectual community at large suggests otherwise?” Froth gathered on her lip.

“Yes, because you bully them.” The words were out before I could stop myself. “You’re not brilliant and people are too afraid to tell you so. You squash dreams and limit potential so that you can keep telling yourself that you’re the best.” Sweat gathered along my hairline and I was sure my binder looked as though it’d been scratched by a werewolf.

Two hard lines appeared in the tyre neck. “You insolent child. Who do you think you are to insult me? You’ve been alive for five minutes and suddenly you’re an expert on what makes good writing.” She shook her head at me. “You have no say here. Get out and come back with an apology and a better topic.”

“No. This topic is the one I want.”

She reached for a pile of papers on her desk and fanned through them before retrieving one. “‘Dear Mr Hardy’ – that’s the name of the faculty head at Oxford – ‘I should like to bring to your attention the application of Miss Eliza Frostrup. Miss Frostrup is, in my opinion, an excellent candidate for Oxford...’” She paused to see my reaction and then crumpled up the letter. The paper fell into her wastebasket along with my dreams.

“Come back with an apology and another topic.”

Poetry Post

One Night in Sea Point

For Ingrid

My mouth is a furry caterpillar cemetery
And the stubs of too many cigarettes
Form a trail leading to a broken heart
On the mattress in the room next door.

It was a night of crossing too many
Imaginery lines in word and deed
And as I suck on a forgotten mint
And stare into the road, my eyes clash
With my weathered, dirty reflection.

The lion of the landscape seems to shuffle
And the litany of loudspeakers in the street
Does little to assuage the bass in my brain;
Those furry caterpillars taste of regret.

I don't want her to wake up and remember
That the man she kissed isn't the man she loves.

Our Souls are Deep with Dreams

When I was younger, I had a recurring dream of my grandmother. It started around the time that I found out from an insensitive friend that she had died. I was three years old. I couldn't believe that my mother would withhold that kind of information from me: I loved my grandmother very much and the idea that she was never coming back traumatised me -- especially because I never got to say goodbye.

So, my brain invented this incredible farewell with a library and laughter and balls of fire and the seaside. None of the elements matter all that much, but the important thing is that I got to see, in my dreamstate, my grandmother's ascent to heaven. It was spectacular and terrifying (how often do you see great balls of fire exploding around your grandmother as she laughs her way into the afterlife?). My dreams were a way for me to process something that I had been excluded from, and I have yet to attend a funeral that matches that level of entertainment.

I got thinking about other dreams as well. When I was working on my poetry anthology, I had a dream in which my dreamstate supervisor gave me the title for the collection. When I have had something pressing to say to someone, I could shout it to them in the dreamscape, especially when it wasn't polite to do so in real life. And when I met someone that I felt I couldn't quite trust, my dreams gave me a dramatisation of his despicable and underhanded nature.

These aren't our only dreams, however. There are awake dreams too; the ones where we do the equivalent of what Sting suggests in "Brand New Day": turn back the clock, start over and do the things we love with reckless abandon. In my experience, it's easier to ignore the dreams we have when we're asleep because we can rationalise them as figments of our imagination. The dreams we have right now, for our day-to-day lives, will persist until we chase them. They will haunt us with things like "could have", "should have" and, my  favourite, "what if".

Perhaps it's because I find myself at a point where I know that big changes are coming to my life, but I have made a decision to go after my dreams. It's absolutely scary and infintely exciting at the same time, but, more importantly, it feels right. If I were to complete Martin Luther King Jr's famous refrain, I'd say: I have a dream that I will live my dream of being a writer. (You know something? I already am: this blog and the projects I have going are allowing me to live my dream. It's so awesome I could burst.)

I'll leave you to think about your dreams, the ones you'd do if money were no object and you had all the time in the world. And, whatever you do with those dreams, see life as the amazing adventure that it is. Most importantly, dream on!