Creative Writing
Declaration of Love
By Alice Richardson
He is a liar and a cheat.
He has a pockmarked soul and a charred heart, but I love him.
I love him like I need to breathe. I love him like I need to eat. I love
him to stay alive.
I don’t enjoy loving him, in fact I hate it, but it cannot be helped.
It is not a matter of choice. It just is. Just as hunger needs food or
drought needs rain. There is no rhyme or reason or chemical equation to
explain my love for him. I weather my fate unable to move, like a granite
boulder on top of a moor.
Sometimes I look at him and I despise him. His laugh curdles my stomach
and his curled lips make me sick; but then it comes, like a warm wave
washing over me. His midnight eyes suck me back into the dark, gravelly
ocean that is my love for him.
I try and love other people. I am trying right now. He is kind and good-looking
and he makes me laugh. He has grey, unassuming eyes that make me feel
secure. He is neat and warm looking, like a well made bed. He has long,
slender fingers with pale half-moon nails that stroke my hair softly.
His voice is low and smooth like hot milk at bed- time. Sadly this will
not last long. There is no use fighting it. I have discovered before.
Soon every time I lean back into his warm embrace it will prickle me like
gorse. Then I will know that it has begun again. At first it is just an
irritating sound that fades in and out of my days, pulsing like a metronome.
Then it becomes louder and more foreboding. Then it is visible like a
dark cloud blooming on the horizon. Then it melts the grey eyes, slender
hands and soft voice and they become unfamiliar and annoying.
When the tempest has passed, I am left alone again, the grey eyes gone
and the black ones still staring at me.
There is no point fighting it or explaining it to anyone that asks. I
love him. It is as simple as that.
The Untalented Mr. Dunmede
By Alice Richardson
Today Tom Dunmede was going
to kill his wife. He had been trying unsuccessfully all week, but today
he felt that luck was on his side.
Talitha had tricked him into marriage thirty-five years ago. They had
sat clutching each other’s gloved hands on the cold park bench by
the public toilets and watched the blue line seal their fate. They had
loved each other then.
That all changed ten months later when she told him that the baby wasn’t
his. Divorce was not an option. His starchy and clean-shaven father-in-law
mintily explained that should Tom even think about leaving his daughter
he would lose his job and the house. He would be left with nothing.
The last thirty years had been a silent protest that went unnoticed by
everyone at work and at home and he was reduced to rolling his eyeballs
and muttering to himself, completely ignored like a sarcastic pot plant.
That is until the first week in November.
On Monday he had tried poisoning her. He cooked spaghetti Bolognese in
their stainless steel kitchen humming to himself as he seasoned, garnished
and served up spaghetti laced with arsenic.
Talitha had murmured half-hearted thanks as he set the plate down beside
her. She was sitting on the peach sofa engrossed in a soap on the television.
He watched her from the kitchen as he served himself clean Bolognese.
He sat down and started eating, hating her furrowed brows and the tip
of her tongue that poked out in concentration. Finally she picked up her
fork without taking her eyes from the screen. It came up to her little
mouth, open like a pigeon’s, a forkful of freedom. Tom held his
breath, his fork poised at his open mouth, but then her nose crinkled
and she dropped the fork back onto the plate so that it clattered, along
with Tom’s hopes.
Apparently she was a vegetarian now. Apparently she had told him this
loads of times, but he, being a stupid, self-centred old fart had neglected
to hear, remember or acknowledge this. She scraped his glorious plan into
the bin and then slammed the front door on her way to Well Being class.
On Tuesday he tried electrocuting her. It was her pampering day and she
locked herself in the bathroom with the portable telly, her cigarettes
and some soothing candles. Tom’s neck tingled as the idea formed
in his mind. He would ask if he could just quickly go in to get his blood
pressure tablets and then would knock the television into the bath, killing
the old witch in a glorious explosion of suds and water.
When he did knock however, she refused to let him in. When he asked if
she could forgive herself when she found him dead at the bottom of the
stairs in half an hour, there was silence. Eventually after more pleading
the latch snapped back and he went in. She stepped back into the bath
as he stumbled coughing and spluttering into the perfumed mist. As he
felt blindly for the telly, he tripped on the outstretched cord of her
hairdryer. He crashed to the floor cracking his head on the edge of the
bath. He woke up in Casualty a few hours later.
Today was different though. He would be rid of her he could feel it. He
sat smiling behind his paper as she did her yoga on the living room floor.
After breakfast he had to bury the cat (bolognaise), then he had the whole
day to plot, plan and carry out the perfect murder. At that moment she
came into the room in a fuscia leotard. She stood in front of him with
her hands on her hips for a few minutes, catching her breath. After a
minutes silence he brought his paper down reluctantly, to look at her.
She looked at him pityingly; the way you would look at a rabbit you had
just maimed and now had to run over.
‘What?’ Tom asked
‘Tom, I have been waiting for a right time to tell you this, but
I just don’t think there is a right time, so I’m just going
to come out and say it.’
Tom’s palms prickled with apprehension. This was the most they’d
said to each other in months. ‘Oh Christ’ he thought, ‘she’s
pregnant. That would be just typical. That would really screw things up.
I suppose the plan could be postponed, but nine more months? Nightmare.
And then what if the child becomes attached to her?’
‘Tom? Tom, are you listening to me?’
He snapped out of it and looked back at her.
‘Tom I’m leaving you. I’ve met someone else. His name
is Geoff and he is an estate agent, which is pretty great actually because
it meant he got this house on the market and sold just like that’
she snapped her fingers. ‘So anyway, I’m sorry Tom, but it
hasn’t been working for a long time has it? We’ll talk about
the logistics later. Right now I’ve got basket weaving so I have
to run.’ She kissed his forehead and left the room.
Tom sat with the wilting paper in his lap and stared at a grease mark
on the yellow wall. Then he stood up, folded the paper and went outside
to bury the cat.
Friday the Thirteenth
By Alice Richardson
I decided to take a walk by
the sea. It was grey and cold out but I thought this might make me feel
dramatic and wind-swept. I walked down to the sea front and sat on a bench
and watched the waves explode against the sea-wall, spraying white spittle
into the sky. A murky cloud spread ominously over my head. So far, my
plan to go for a walk was failing. I wasn’t even walking. I was
sitting on a bench reading the graffiti scratched into it: Kevin is gay
and Susie is a slag, but Charlotte and Bruce love each other, 4 Eva.
Think. Ideas for an article. Urban decay contrasted with natural beauty.
Interesting and thought provoking. A juxtaposition of the spray can-splattered
wall behind me, staring menacingly back at its tempestuous and spitting
rival, the sea…
Words petered and drowned in overused poetic clichés about the
sea. Discouraged, and quite wet now I got up and decided to go to Spar
to get a bottle of wine instead.
It started raining and passing cars sponged passed me. I got to the railway
bridge and stood under it as the rain started falling hard. A black cat
toed the pavement testily and looked up at me. Without blinking, he padded
towards me and circled my legs before walking across my path. I wiped
my nose and stepped out into the rain.
In the warm Spar, I waited in a steaming queue of wet customers. I had
reached the stage of frustration just before defeat and my mind swam with
formless titles: Is Mother’s Pride an outdated and sexist name for
a twenty-first century loaf of bread? Was the man in front of me asleep?
Was he a man? Hard to tell. It was hopeless. I paid and left. As I walked
down the hill towards home, the bottom of the bag collapsed and the bottle
fell to the floor in slow motion, until the clean crashing sound broke
the silence. Cheap wine and glass exploded over the glistening pavement
and trickled into the gutter. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Pain began to tap above my eye and my feet felt cold and wet.
I found myself standing in the queue again, reeking of wine, and clutching
another bottle. When my turn came at the counter, the bespectacled cashier
eyed me suspiciously.
‘Have you got any I.D?’ she said.
‘No, but you served me a minute ago. I was in here a minute ago,
buying a bottle of wine, remember?’
She looked down at the bottle of wine and then back up at me.
‘It broke’ I stammered, ‘the other bottle I mean’.
She blinked, unimpressed. Exasperated, I explained slowly, ‘the
plastic bag that you put my bottle of wine in, split just now as I was
walking home, so I’ve come back in for another one. Maybe you could
double bag it this time, thank you’ I said reaching into my purse
for my wallet. As I was rummaging, I became aware of a lack of movement.
I looked up into her expressionless face
‘If you don’t have any I.D, I’m afraid I can’t
serve you’ she said robotically.
I took a deep breath and clutched the counter. In a low voice, through
gritted teeth I tried again, aware of the growing, coughing queue behind
me. ‘But you served me five minutes ago and I didn’t have
any I.D then either.’ Her mouth snapped shut on a piece of gum and
she had the glazed look that traffic wardens get; a shutter came down
behind her eyes and the argument was over. I was the only human involved
now, persistence was useless. I glared as menacingly as I could at the
glinting discs of her glasses, and then walked out.
When I got home, I sank into a hot bath. No wine. No story. Ideas fluttered
and flopped like bath suds. On the other hand, there had been sublime
scenery, dramatic weather, tragedy, violence and a cat. What more could
a reader want?
|