Word Tombola Challenge

For Joss Stewart

Words: #persuasion #openly #horribly #florist

Written by James Stewart

Mary knew him on sight. Same time every Friday. Most weeks one or two weekdays too. The same bouquet, the same cheesy card, the same line. The only thing that ever changed was the girl’s name.

She had to be honest. To begin with, she had found him appealing. His open face, his confident swagger, his easy charm. As time had gone by and she saw the same ritual, time after time after time, she quickly began to see him for what he was. A pick-up artist. A slimeball. She had started keeping a record of the girls' names, as a joke at first, and she and the other girls would laugh behind their hands at The List. She had worked at the florist for less than six months and it was already into its second page. It had been nothing. He was a joker. A chancer. It was a harmless bit of fun.

Then came Alice. They had been friends since school, and they had a lot in common. At lunch-times they would go and drink together and talk about nothing in particular. On holidays, they wrote to each other on old-fashioned writing paper using pen and ink. Alice was like that – old-fashioned. She had a little workshop from which she sold knitted trinkets, and wooden carvings, and animals made from seashells, and reclaimed furniture.

Alice would not say what was wrong at first, shame clenched behind defiant tears. Mary had driven her to the clinic, had waited with her, had driven her sobbingly back home without ever going in. Mary had sat waiting for her outside doctors' offices, and gone with her to the classes.

For several months, Alice would say nothing of the father, until one evening on the way back from the clinic, she began to speak. Slowly at first, then more and more, in a weeping torrent of confession. The charm, the flowers, the card. The persuasion. Then, nothing. Mary had sat in furious silence, cold realisation rising horribly inside her. The pick-up artist.

For Joe Prinzi

#oblivion #superhero #gag #palace

Written by James Stewart

                                                                                                                   The atmosphere was boozy and stale, dank and sweaty. The floor was tacky. Behind the optics the cut glass mirrors gave the place an air of faded grandeur, the last vestiges of its once-great days as a Victorian gin palace. The filthy dark green walls still bore ancient gas lamps, and were stained black where they had burned all those years ago. On the stage, the warm-up was struggling. The crowd in here was rough. Oily, coarse men with livid complexions. These men had not come for wit, candour and wordplay. They wanted ugly misogyny and rough-hewn prejudice. They wanted bigotry and foul spite. They were acolytes of a long gone age of vitriol and bile and this place was their temple.

Ted recognised the man on stage, John or Jack something. He had a goofy act. Spiky hair and wonky glasses and a lurid suit a size too small. Ted had heard his material before. He was good. Ted had seen him make people actually spit out their drink with laughter. It is something you see a lot on TV; not so much in real life. It is a great feeling to get that kind of a reaction. Tonight though, he looked like he thought he was about to get stabbed. Halfway through the Eskimo joke his voice wavered and cracked and his eyes swivelled towards Ted in mute supplication. Ted looked studiously at the dingy carpet, anywhere to avoid that helpless gaze. He knew the feeling, being on stage and wanting to be anywhere, anywhere else. Simply craving utter and complete oblivion.

Ted looked at his watch. Ten minutes. He took his prompt cards out of his pocket and went through them one at a time. His breathing was level and calm. He knew exactly the joke he was going to begin with. It was new and it was daring and it was breathlessly exciting. It gave him goosebumps just to think about it. It was his finest creation. It would be the greatest joke ever told. He had decided to unveil it here, in this vile pit of venom and moral decay, to prove a point. It was clean and it was fresh. He was going to convert them. He experienced a lifting feeling in his soul at the very prospect. It was Evangelical. This joke would change the world. It would be his crowning achievement.

For Anna Carpenter

words: #taj mahal #tree surgeon #rectangle #bathroom

Written by Kali Milburn

For Aaron Lembo

words: #basketball player #shoe horn #yoghurt pot #hairdryer

Written by Kali Milburn

                                                                                                                   The yoghurt pot was empty. Had he eaten the ENTIRE thing? The emptiness within was at least the size of his own face. ‘That’s a faceful of yoghurt’, he thought to himself. As a basketball player, Lembo did need his essential fats but perhaps this was going overboard. A quick rub of the tummy satisfied his worries and he rushed into the hallway to shove on his trainers. He was late for the game.

What?

How....?

For a sportsman, Lembo had fairly large feet (size 12 to be exact) and they had always fit inside the flimsy size 12 trainers. Always.

No matter how hard he screwed in his ankles, flexed his toes and shoved his monstrous feet into the shoes, they simply would not fit. Out of pure desperation he tried the odd contraption hanging up by the radiator, the shoe horn. Nothing would allow his foot’s entry. Collapsing onto the welcome mat, into a persperating heap, he sighed heavily.

He’d heard of this before. The live cultures of god-knows-what within the yoghurt had increased the size of his feet, at least by a few inches. His toes bulged and the veins underneath the skin wriggled like grubs. They throbbed with heat, radiating warmth like a live animal. The weather was indeed warm outside but this was no way for feet to behave. Perhaps the only way to release the pressure was to cool them down. He sure as hell wasn't going to 'pop' them.

For Lorien Kaack

words: #sorcerer #overlap #sister-in-law #canoodle

Written by Kali Milburn

For the mysterious 'no-name'

words: #licked stamp #richly #lava lamp #very short knight

Written by Kali Milburn

                                                                                                                   Being born into the most prestigious family on this side of the hill made Terrowin uncomfortable. Of course he was able to frolic; reprimanding younger page boys, chasing well-dressed ladies of the court, luring them back to his richly decorated manor house with the promise of mead and a kiss between the thighs.

His only trouble consisted of jeers from other knights. To begin with, the hearty laughs and calls of ‘artless whelp’ roused a nervous smile, however after months of teasing, the words now made him cringe and sweat into his mail. Terrowin had no trouble being a very short knight on the jousting lanes, his meager size did nothing to weigh down the horse, and he did well to dodge the oncoming lances. However when appearing in public (as a knight must often do) he felt terribly inadequate at 4'2 against the other knights. He could often hear the echoes of almost-silent laughter from inside the metal helms.

For Laura Pagani

Words: #featherduster #firefighter #Brazil #roundabout

Written by James Stewart

                                                                                                                   Around the station, the boys called him ‘Featherduster,’ because that was what you did back then, when you admired somebody, really admired them. You gave them a stupid deprecating nickname and never let on how damn much you really thought of them. I’m pretty sure he knew, but there was no telling. Ever. I hope he knew. He was the backbone of us all. The whole damn place.

I remember, once, he got drunk and got in a scuffle with a firefighter at one of those dumb services galas the rich society ladies threw to make themselves feel worthwhile every year or so, and he’d given the guy a lickin’ all right, but just enough to put him down and stop him coming. Then he cleaned the guy up, and took him to the bar and bought him a beer. He was like that. Mean as all hell, but when you are down, he’s got your back and he’d take every bullet in town for you. A true cop. Turns out, two years later that same firefighter pulled him out of the blaze at the Parkinson place, and had to put him on his ass to stop him going back in there. Toughest old coot on the force.

...

Excuse me. I’m sorry about that. As I was saying.

S’funny, old Featherduster, he could have been a pro boxer, and instead he stuck around to look after all of our sorry asses. I never knew why. It always seemed like he was searching for something, like he could not stop until he found it. Oh man, he could have taken home the belt, though, for sure. I went a few rounds with him one time, my old lady had a fit, thought I’d got beat up. I told her it was Featherduster and she just marched right down to the station, bold as old Lucky himself, and really gave it to him hard. And the chief just stood there and took it as she sets about him with her handbag and whatnot, and his eyes looked at me with this expression that said: “Well here’s a thing now, just what am I supposed to do with this?” That was his catch phrase: “Well here’s a thing now.” Got so he didn’t even have to say it. I could have died laughing. 

...

Sorry.

So, last time I saw the chief would have been roundabout a couple of years after he retired, he’d just got back from Brazil. He stopped by the bar, where me and Marty and a couple of the other guys still go. He looked happy. He looked at peace. Whatever it was he was looking for, kept him going back out onto those streets all those years, looked like he finally found it.

So ladies, gentlemen, here's to the chief.

For Ellie Maher

words: #clothes peg #vapidly #completely #chase

Written by Kali Milburn

                                                                                                                   Humming softly, the pale girl in the duck-egg dress almost drifted into the hillside fog. She went about her work vapidly, with a boredom that showcased how often this same task had been exercised. Hanging up the sheets was the hardest; the dull frostiness of the linen chewing her fingertips, the length of the material stretching her arms through the shoulders, leaving a dull knotting sensation across the muscles. It was tedious task at the least, each clothes peg nipping at her flesh like wooden rabbit jaws. The early morning mist pinched her bare ankles as she stood only in velveteen slippers against the dew-dropped greenery.

A sense of deafened melancholy roamed the hills this morning, the death of her late father still hung about the house and the grounds. A sigh seeped from her bitten lips as she bent low to grasp the last of the garments; a soft pink pair of knickers.

For Michael Probart

words: #flag #pig pen #child's crown #train driver

Written by Kali Milburn

                                                                                                                   The great flag was hoisted up above the pig pen, signifying a change. Since the child had been ‘removed’ from the throne, deaths had occurred much less frequently. The pikes towering above the pen’s walls were headless nowadays, albeit they did look quite bare.

A judicious vote was taken among the piglets. Another child could never be appointed as King Pig; surely the last one had proven that point. The child’s crown had been near destroyed; fears of tainted metal from the depths of the sheep enclosure had been passed around like a tar-greased tobacco pipe. Perhaps melting down the bars that the ewes once chewed had never promised to form an ideal crown.

The piglets were fond of a kind man who frequently visited the farmyard to scatter scraps of turnip and corn. They knew not of his name, but his hands forever reeked of diesel fuel. His cap, navy uniform and stench suggested to the piglets that a profession in trains was involved. 'Fabulous, a traveller who has seen the world' they trilled.

I like to think being brought up in the wilderness of the Yorkshire suburbs surrounded by addicts and arsonists has given me a bit of an edge to my writing. I like to explore the unusual and flash fiction is a perfect format for my writing as absolutely anything can happen. Sense need not be made.

I study Creative Arts at Bath Spa University and the course has introduced me to the likes of Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, H.P.Lovecraft and more. Short stories give the author a chance to produce intensity in words that cannot be exercised thoroughly through the length of an entire novel and I think that is why I have fallen in love. (Also if you're a bit lazy, like me, flash fiction is far more pleasurable to read)

For Maz Nixon

words: #spaceship #pantry #guffaw #animator

Written by James Stewart

                                                                                                                   So we always finished on ‘Somebody To Love,’ and Dick had this trick where he’d put a foil KitKat wrapper under the strings, on that last screaming, crashing, climactic note that made the sustain just seem to go on for EVER. And then he’d just put it on the stand like that and that baby’d still be SINGIN’, and we’d just walk off the stage like it was nothing. Nothing. Drove ‘em nuts. Every. Time. And we’d get off and we’d just guffaw. I mean like rolling around laughing.

Hell, we were better than the real thing. Jefferson Starship got nothing on Henderson Spaceship. You get that good when you play the same goddam show three times a week. For ten goddam years. That’s what it’s like being in a tribute band.

I mean you gotta love it, or you’ll go spare crazy, I ain’t kidding. This one guy, Emilio, he did Chaquico’s bit, and he was good, y’know, like he could play, but he was a good likeness too. Like he had the hair and the moustache going on. He, anyway, this one time, like we’d had a sell-out month, playing EVERY NIGHT that month, so he’s doing his thing on ‘White Rabbit,’ and we can see he’s not into it, like he’s done this a thousand times but he’s all dropping notes, and he’s not hitting it like PERFECT, y’know, like he should be doing, and we can see him like griping and grinding his teeth, and then he up and just smashes his guitar down on the stage, and there’s this like feedback that really adds to the tension of the moment, y’know. It’s heavy. So he turns round to us all, and there’s this vicious feedback an’ all, and the whole show is shot to hell, and he’s looking at us like panting with rage, like HEAVING, and he’s grinding away at his molars there, and you could see the whites of his eyes like ALL THE WAY AROUND. And he looks at us and he just screams.

He’s like: “What is up with you people?”

He says: “Who are you? Really, who are you? Do you even know? You been doing this so long, you been someone else for so long, how do you even know who you are? How can you do this? Your life, your whole life, you ain’t creative, you act like you are but you ain’t, your whole life is just pretending to be someone else, someone great, someone creative. Just faking it. How can you live like this?”

And he just pushes right past us and storms off the stage. So we got to finish the show with like no lead guitar, which sucked. Last I heard he was training to be an animator.

For Robert Bull

words: #exhilaratingly #tree #Nigel #boarding pass

Written by James Stewart

                                                                                                                   Two more drops. Wet leaves blew yellowly across the slick road. A billboard promising wanton delights flapped sickly in the wind’s stinging blast. For the eighteenth time that day, the courier checked his watch. Two more drop-offs. A thrill of excitement coursed through his veins. The BBC had read his script. They liked it. His full treatment lay safe and dry in his satchel. His final drop.

Once again, he kicked his compact little scooter into life. To his ears, it purred exhilaratingly. His wife had laughed openly when he first brought it home. She had thought it was a prank. The thing was silly, it’s true, but he had an odd fondness for it. He thought of it like a faithful hound, no, a Shetland pony. The courier grinned and laughed inwardly at the thought, as the doughty little machine waded stoutly past yet another London jam. He raised a proud two-fingered salute to the swerving, honking busses.

As he swung through the gathering traffic, the courier’s mind began to fill with doubts. Mentally, he checked off the grammar, the formatting, the voice of his play, line by line. It was perfect, he was sure of it. He couldn’t change a line, even if he wanted to. He wouldn’t. His characters were alive, they wouldn’t let him. Audrey cast him her characteristic admonishing glance, saying nothing. In his head, she was a promising young actress with nothing on her CV but a walk-on line in ‘Sherlock.’ Blink and you’d miss her. It was love at first sight. He had written the part for her. Nigel’s laconic response belonged only to Martin Freeman. ‘Yeah, good luck with that,’ he told himself. It was perfect. Not only that, it would be a hit, and he could give up working at the courier place for good, and write full time. They could take that holiday. He already had the tickets ready in his browser on the kitchen computer, ready to pay for and print off the boarding passes when he got home.

He played out the scenes in his head, as he had a thousand times before, speaking the lines out loud under his breath, testing the rhythm and cadence, the dip and dive of the drama. In his mind’s eye, Audrey and Nigel lived and breathed, and their perfectly choreographed world of colour went on forever. He did not know exactly at what point they had started telling him what to write, but it seemed like the play had always been like that.

He was somewhere close to the end of the second act, Audrey lifting her glittering tear-stained face and telling Nigel that she could never be free, when it happened. The courier didn't see the cyclist, the taxi, the bus. He didn't see the tree. He only saw the world spin. For one brief, shard-filled moment, he was back in sodden, wind-swept London.

For Sophie Lee

words: #eagerly #unravel #sea floor #worst enemy

Written by James Stewart

                                                                                                                   She rode across the bloodless desert on a ’67 Shovelhead Harley, heading nowhere but out, out, out. Going nowhere, nothing left behind. Just on.  Days turned into weeks and still the unrepentant sand lashed eagerly at her wounded lips.

At length she came upon the desiccated husk of a once-thriving drilling town. ‘Welcome to Sea Floor’ read the rusting sign. Someone had a sense of humour. She’d hit the bottom alright. She pulled the machine into the shade of a septuagenarian gas station, a rickety construction that still miraculously clung to life as it choked the last remnants of its precious liquid into trembling trucks and tractors.

The kid who worked the pumps stole shy glances at her as she scraped the bugs from the blasted windshield. He was scrawny; couldn’t been more’n twenty-one or twenty-two. His filthy coveralls had a red bandana hanging from the back pocket. Something in the way he moved, his confidence around machines more’n folk, reminded her of Mike. Her best friend, her business partner, her lover. Her worst enemy.

“Say, Mac, where can a thirsty girl get a drink in this flyblown burg anyhow?”

He coughed hesitantly. “Old man Mortimer got a drinkin’ bar couple blocks over. I get off in a minute. I could show ya, if y’like... they got beer. And whiskey.”

As he was finishing up, she revved the engine and peeled him off a few bills from one of the rolls tucked into her inside pocket, on the gun side.

“Take me there.”

They sat and drank, bar dusty with smoke, last rays of the day’s merciless sun held at bay by uneven slats of splintering wood, behind which the town’s hoary inhabitants hid their lives and their shame and their hopes, which one by one had begun to unravel as the wells had slowly coughed the last of their promise onto the dusty ground. They spoke of oil and machines, and sweet dreams, and rock and roll, and such things as wouldn’t let you down like people would. And as the empty bottles and shot glasses collected along the bar they laughed, and sang.

At dawn the following day, they were married in a drive-through, by a priest named Solomon, a strange, stony, buzzard-like creature of the desert, and she felt as blissful in that moment as any time she could remember.

Written by Sophie Atkin-Smith from the draw of:

fortune teller

motorway

martini

top of a cliff

Faith had always known that she would become a fortune teller, from the day she opened her eyes for the first time. The blue orbs had rolled around unblinking for a few moments, images of the world rushing towards her, and she had known. She grew up from the soft bundle of infancy plagued with coded dreams that she would often spend entire days deciphering. They were usually insignificant; when there would be snow or that a kitten would turn up on their doorstep mewing its hunger and chill… None of her predictions, although they were almost always spot on, had ever been ground breaking. Never had she foreseen an event that could turn anyone’s life upside down. Never had she impressed anyone with her gift, and so it went unnoticed. That was until she turned thirteen.

At thirteen Faith’s life changed direction. This change of direction initially appeared to be only in a physical sense: her family uprooted and moved to Scotland. She knew at 11 that this move would happen. She had been dozing one summer evening, a book in her hand that her eyelids had become too heavy to read, when she had been gripped by the strongest premonition she had ever had. It had come as a repetition of three images. A thickglass, a turnip and a tartan wardrobe.

On her first day of school she clutched at her books with a nervousness that was entirely new to her. She didn’t know anyone. She didn’t know where anything was. Her sleeves balled in her neat fists. She was seated next to a girl much shorter than her, with a glossy mane of dark hair.

“What’re you called then wee lassie?” she chirped at Faith who quivered in her chair.

“Uhm, Faith.”

“Faith, ahh, I’m Martini. You’re no Scot then eh?”

“Nn-no.”

The two girls became inseparable, and after some months Faith confessed her talents. Martini listened avidly before exclaiming: “My auntie has a crystal ball, could you work it?”

Faith thought for a second before replying “Only one way to find out!”

After school that day the pair rushed off up the hill, Martini leading, both walking as fast as their legs would carry them. Martini’s aunt lived on the top of a cliff, looking out onto the sea that thrashed and broiled against the horizon. Faith took a deep breath before entering. This was the first time she had truly tested what she believed she was.

Written by Sophie Atkin-Smith from the draw of:

hairspray

ace of spades

amorally

dinosaur

______________________________________________________

Dario had been the dog groomer to go to for years, dominating the canine style scene since the 1980s. He’d been young, fresh faced when he first competed in his local town hall. He politely smiled at the shrivelled figures of old dears, forever cooing over their trimmed and fluffed poodles. Shook the clammy hand of the head judge, the librarian out of contest time. The middle aged men with cashmere sweaters carefully knotted over their shoulders tut-tutted sadly at the new-comer. “Not a canary’s hope…” rode on the wet-dog air that circulated through the portable heaters. Yet Dario had stunned them all with the most exquisitely shaven ace of spades any of them had ever seen, and he continued through an atypically long career of shaking things up in the world of pedigree fashion.

 Woof! and Loyal Companions had all written that Dario’s careful use of the newest range of hairsprayfor dogs and tedious dying of the fur to create the effect of scales one might find on a dinosaur was his ‘piece de resistance’ and wrote enthusiastically of his up-coming entry in the national championships.

Of course, a month later as he sat in the sunlight with a steaming tea: polystyrene affair on a park bench. All the major dog literature available (he subscribed to any deemed of any merit, big or small) was clutched tightly in his white fist. “Amorally” they had written. He had behaved “amorally”. His phone buzzed like a cricket, his hand shot to his pocket, swatting.

For Lucy Carpenter.

Words: Importantly, Inaudibly, Sewers, Bottle of Perfume.

Written by Tino Prinzi

_________________________________________________________________________ 

The bottle of perfume was Cassandra’s most valuable possession. Without it everyone would know her most embarrassing secret; people already knew enough about her without them finding out about this too. She carried the perfume everywhere she went and, most importantly, she never let it run empty before she replaced it with another. If she did let it run out before she replaced it then again her secret would be revealed; the moon would sooner plummet to Earth than Cassandra would be without her perfume.

She was the type of person who was always prepared. She was a planner. When she woke up every morning she knew exactly what she was doing; her bath towel and three types of body wash would be on the chair at the end of her bed, her clothes would be laid out beneath the towel, the kettle would be full of water with her mug and coffee already stationed and, to the left of it, the cat food a little further to the right ready to feed little Gwendolyn. This would all be accomplished within the first twenty minutes she’d be awake – she was not one to mess about. Cassandra had a plan for the rest of the day, the week, the month, the year. She had a two year plan, a five year plan, a ten year plan. Her unrevealed secret was sole reason why she had become such a precise planner of her own life

The only thing she didn’t plan for was the bus hitting her this morning.

She knew something had happened – something she hadn’t planned for – and she second guessed she was at the hospital, but all she was worried about was her bottle of perfume. How long ago had she sprayed it? Where was it? She inaudibly mumbled her thoughts aloud.

“Dr Reynolds, I think she is trying to say something? I can’t quite make it out?”

“Maybe that explains the smell – it’s like the sewers are vomiting up my nose.”

Cassandra had heard everything she needed to hear and had dreaded hearing. They hadn’t quite hit the nail on the head but they hit the nail nonetheless. What they could smell was her. She was the source of the sewage stench – it was not her breath but her entire body that emitted the gut-wrenching odour and there was nothing she could do except drench herself in perfume. It was so bad that most of the stench would neutralise the effects of the perfume so she didn’t even get to enjoy what the perfume smelt like.

But now she could only reek. She allowed herself to slip back into unconsciousness.

She woke up to kind eyes and dyed orange hair framing a gentle, pale face; a face she didn’t recognise but in a uniform she did. Cassandra thought she looked pleased to see her awake, as if she were bursting to tell her something important, as if she couldn’t smell her.

“I know what you have,” the nurse smiled at her. “I know how we can fix you.”

All Cassandra could do was cry.