Dribble Drabble

A collection of drabbles – stories of 100 words.

[dddrabble]

The Morning

Through the slated blinds, the overcast morning casts my mind

Back to Melbourne winters;

Grey and concrete,

Terrace houses and workers cottages

My grandparents generation, getting about

Having chats

Visiting the shops

Their voices difference cadences to us, their laughter somehow easier

Their worlds not smaller, just higher resolution on a tighter canvas

From our kitchen, the view is of the back of a terrace house

It’s roof cobble together, the building not yet gentrified

It’s like it’s always been; a house of itinerate travellers

People making do, getting by, getting about

Their laughter easy maybe, the cadences different again/

[dddrabble]

Offering

The sweat from my back leaves a stain on the wall

In the shape of a ghost

In the ocean this morning

I swallowed too much of the water, the salt mixed

With banana

And what started as a tickle become and cough, and a cough a hack,

Until I accidentally, unintentionally, threw up

Into the Indian Ocean

The purple bits of debris floating like fish food

In a much smaller acquarium

I’m not sure

Of the nutritional value

But I offer it to the scaled bodies that I saw

The drew this from me

Like a tendril, water

Extracted.

[dddrabble]

Splash and Wail

All the bodies at the pool are there for different reasons, exploring different rhythms. Some sun themselves, beckoning out the colour from their skins, granting permission to themselves on the scale of minutes or hours, hoping the effects will last weeks, maybe months, but not focusing on the other internal processes they may have started, not felt for years. Others; strokes, head tilt, kick, flip, dip, shimmy, pause. Look.

Sliding back to the change rooms, thongs slurping at the chlorinated water. Shower latches, and the depressed button that releases the water slowly eeks out a great wail, like chrome drowning.

[dddrabble]

Cornelius

Snare snare snare snare kick snare hat hat kick snare

That E string

A mandolin?

Like a strut down a Shinjuku night

Like a strobe attached to a Shinkansen

That you’re running besides

The struts of a bridge

Chop chop chopping the light

To a beautiful rhythm

Heel toe heel toe

Stop.

Like an announcement, a call

The train

Turns to look at you

Extends it’s hand

A set of ceramic white fingers

With crimson plush

Helps you like an eager friend

Wanting to show you the wrong side of the tracks

Onto it’s polished chassis

A slipstream in the beat

[dddrabble]

Water and Air

The milky emerald water

Embraces me

I suck in air from above

And push it out into the depths

In the black rubber that wraps my body

Water trickles, a companion to

The air that snuck through the seems

Between it and my skin

They want to join the rest of their kind

In the depths;

In the depths

Static fat shadows sit

They’re figures upon which

I imprint

Fish or rock

Fossil or coral

Refraction of light

And then they’re gone, with the stroke of my arm

And I tilt again to breathe

To recollect

The stuff that animates

[dddrabble]

Mornington

“You can either decide to tell them, or you can go it on your own,” she said, holding her husband’s hand.

“If you tell them, there will be support processes, structures. If you don’t then that’s fine too. You’ll get to see whether you can do it or not.”

The man sat silently, considering.

“I suppose I’d like the support,” he said, his speech slightly slurred.

The woman smiled, withdrawing her hand, pushing her hair behind her ear.

“There’s nothing to lose by telling them. They’ll help you identify deficits.”

The man smiled, feeling like he didn’t lack a thing.

[dddrabble]

Choices

The balcony over the market reverberated their conversations, their gazes careened off each other and into the sky, across the hazy concrete platform that held them in the air. Borderline alcoholics stood there parading their gaunt bodies, their wrinkled shirts stuck to patches of sweat. They protruded their thin, sick lips into guffawing laughter, and their blotched cheeks jiggled along with their excited stomps. Someone took some gear out of a packet of tobacco and offered it around. The more sophisticated guests placed their pills discretely under their tongues. The blotched-cheeked held them aloft victoriously. Children moved between legs. Someone brought up religion, and how much of an asshole you’d need to be to teach your kids to believe something you’re not even sure of yourself. Let them make their own choices, she said, as the last of her beer trickled down her throat.

[dddrabble]

Insurance

The ad in the newspaper read: "This week only: 30% off for oxygen saturation in the 20th percentile".

I looked down at the ring around my index finger, its small teeth digging into my skin, a bioluminescence seeping under the surface that pulsed with my heartbeat. 

I tapped the ring and it lit up amber. My stats were down.

“I’m going out for a run,” Dane said, leaning over my hunched shoulders. The ring gave a vibration and started glowing enthusiastically.

“Guess I’ll come, too,” I said. The ring squirted a small dose of endorphins, and I got the rush. 

[dddrabble]

The Cage

Mike drove his relatively modest Benz into the cage under the office. Compared to the other gaudy displays of wealth within it, Mike felt his choice was understated, controlled, even elegant. He locked the car with his thumbprint and watched it settled down on its haunches – a controlled deflation where the suspension hissed and the exhaust protracting in. Its champagne-tinted paint job glistened under a soft pool of light. It was like a cocktail dress, he thought, as the private lift thrust him through the building's foundations, past floors teeming with office workers. From outside he, too, glistened under light. 

[dddrabble]

Escape

Still sticking with the longer-form exercise from Steering The Craft. For this one, I wasn’t allowed to use any punctuation (I’ve got a few apostrophes, but whatever). 

The wheels of this stolen car the car I don’t even know stick to this gash in the air we call a freeway well enough I guess and with Lou on the left of me Chilling The Fuck Out like she does we’ve made it pretty far from that monolith of a city that well is not actually monolithic unless you want to be hubristic enough to equate a man made collection of fucking concrete boxes to a mountain and hell I don’t think we’re deserving enough to think that these scars we put on this earth can live up to the seismic unknowable forces that produce something like a mountain at all but yet here we are engaging with fucking modernity in this car and this fucking road despite what we’ve just done and we’re coursing away on this gash-like freeway that slashes through the air like a deep cut in this guzzling churning and pulsating metal beast a beast that’s helping me and Lou or is that Lou and I escape from that place where the fire is still burning and the stone of that  Bureau for Development building is crumbling we hope I couldn’t see and right fucking now the cameras are being algorithmically searched for our faces and I reckon we’ve got minutes if they haven’t calculated our trajectories already God I hope this traffic stays like this so we’re not slowed down we haven’t been in the open for months the sky looks fucking repulsive and Shit I hope the face paint we applied confuses the computers and well Lou doesn’t really seem to give a fuck she’s even got her leg dangling out the window as she reclines and takes a drag on her fucking dart God I love her but I wish sometimes I could be as relaxed as that shit Chill The Fuck Out she says but fuck this car is going fast and God Damn the Bureau are coming and maybe if I can get the angle right we can make it to the road going diagonally underneath to us we’d probably be hidden by the top layers of freeway and not get bombed from the fucking sky but I don’t even really know where we’re going so fuck it I’m just gonna push this beast until it fucking breaks and we’ll deal with it then.

[dddrabble]

The Rue de la Marche

Taking a break from the 100 word format to post some writing i've been doing from the exercises in Steering The Craft - what is so far an excellent and illuminating book on writing by Ursula Le Guin. 

This piece was written for Exercise One - Being Gorgeous. It's all about playing with the sound and rhythm (NOT rhyme) of prose. I broke a rule of the exercise by having a few rhyming bits (that would make it verse, which is not the focus on the exercise), but that was actually more of a reflex of trying to write lyrically, I think. Anyway, I think it's a cute story, so I'm putting it here. 

Little Rosie Dew slod, slipped and sled 

through the cavernous arches of the Rue De La Marche, on the wave 

of procession with the towering men and the women with their curls and their straights 

and all their backs and their fronts push pushing one way.

And Little Rosie Dew was there, between, the legs and the bags

where she sled, slipped and slod over the shiny old stones 

that paved a way across the Rue De La Marche, where she looked 

and she looked 

and there there he was beneath the arch, arching up 

as Little Rosie Dew slod, slipped and sled through the monstrous arches of the Rue De La Marche 

on the wave of procession of the numerous women and the men who acted like there was only one way to go, only forward and not back, 

and definitely not across like Little Rosie Dew who was trying and trying to go get through 

the march, through the gaps, between, the legs and the bags 

and the heads with all their straight curls dangling under those arches.

But there, there he was; Poor Little Maw there looking scared, arched up on his back until Little Rosie Dew had finally stood still.

Under the cavernous arch she lent down to pet him and together they waited

for the wave of procession with the women and the men who were late 

with all their bags and their suits moving off down the Rue De La Marche towards whatever was forward and definitely not back.

And Rosie Dew who was big, enough, picked up Poor Maw and she smiled as they went back, back, back up the Rue De La Marche where the plump big sky, it lived without arches.

[dddrabble]

Maps

Dad always said we’d make it there one day. He would bring up Earth on his screen and scroll down with big clunks of the wheel. The static blue marble would rotate, zoom and pan until the black and blue gave way to green, rust and white.

“There it is”, he would say, his greasy finger pointing, smudging the screen. He could find it in seconds; Alaska; that bus in the woods.

I don’t know when he left, but I know he’s there. Not yet visible under his smudged fingerprint, waiting for the satellites to memorialize him. He made it. 

[dddrabble]

When technology stopped

Imagine a world in which technological process halts; what would the implications be? The rhetoric around technology (as communicated by the companies that sell it) is that progress is good, that faster is better. What would it mean to have a story set in such a world? Would it be the corporations advocating for the resumption of progress and development? What would have caused the progress of technology to stop? 

[dddrabble]

The Encyclopaedia Salesmen

Doug stared out across the lawn from underneath the thinning tree, a volume of Britannica M-O held under his shirt, clenched to his chest. Whatever shelter he sought wasn’t forthcoming. He could see his son on the balcony, riding his trike in circles. Smoke rose from the cabin chimney on the lodge. He didn't know why he was standing there, as the rain trickled down his back, onto the pages of the precious book. He wouldn't be able to sell it, but, if the pages didn’t stick, at least his son would be able to read about The Moon tonight. 

[dddrabble]

Hunting for the lake

'It mustn't be far from here.' I looked up at the sky and then down to the map, trying to glimpse the connection that brought us here. Trying to remember if that's the place we were. 'Look, the tower!', you said, sliding the door of the van shut and pointing over to the next scrubby mountain peak. On top of it, that red and white metallic pinnacle we had spotted from the air. 'It was west of here' you said. I looked up at the sky again, searching for that connection. Nothing. I shrugged, jumping back to the van. 'Alright. Lets go.'

[dddrabble]

Echoes

At first it looked like a puff of insects, swarming around some invisible prey, but it was the downward trajectory of the spiral that betrayed them for what they were. I had only just glimpsed it at the bottom of the frame, but a dark body had fallen and disappeared. These particles were feathers, recently released from a plummeting body, swirling gently in the air and making visible the streams and valleys of the wind. A grey piece of down floated by my window. These weren't insects, but the last traces of something that was no longer visible. Echoes. Finales.

[dddrabble]

Engrossed

"Let's go already!" "Just one more page". Ange didn't look up. Her mum sighed, chin in her palm, bouncing her foot impatiently. Another page turned, was devoured quickly. The beating fans dangled from the ceiling, spinning the sounds, throwing them at her - the chinking teaspoons and middle-aged cackles battling against the page. But nothing could penetrate her concentration. Ange's eyes widened, the words animated off the page and across the table as the chapter reached its climax. "Ange, c'mon!" The words flickered, then halted. "Now!" The bubble burst. The world of sound came crashing in, and the page shrank.