winter haze (400)

the city is indecisive tonight. late-evening sunlight glitters weakly off a myriad of glass, a maze of cars and buildings and filters through thin lace curtains. in the not-so far-off  distance, there's a series of factories and houses all burning fires. smoke rises, hangs heavy and congested in the air, curls into the buildings themselves…

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Vignette (4)

There's a house-cafe on the street corner. It's incongruously placed in the middle of the city,  where you expect to find tall office buildings and functional apartment blocks - not so much a two-storey house with a front yard and parking space. In front, in the yard is a mini-cart. It's not unlike a street cart,…

Outlined

Flash Fiction July, 17 The city skyline takes a while to arise from the horizon; it always does, just as I've driven over the last bridge to my destination. Every time, I'm struck by how it appears to be a magic trick: one minute it isn't there, and the next minute it is, just as…

meandering (400)

on the third saturday of every second month, i have a routine. i arise at dawn, prepare from scratch dough for bread. while i count the petals of the flowers i ordered online, the dough sits in a hot water cupboard and rises, enough for baking. all of this is done in silence, the only…

cactus + perfection + city

first apartment, buy a plant, make a solemn vow to nurture it, perfect. city girl pretends to commune with nature, brings a cactus back home. too busy living for perfection, there's no time: put under sun; go.

NaPoWriMo 20 (fog)

walking through the city: it's six a.m. on a chill winter day. fog abounds, i can't see more than thirty metres down the road. isolated - it's a public holiday. the cold brushes over me ignoring my fashionable jacket. the sky remains violet as one car swooshes past. gone, into the fog. disappearing in a…

Places

I think the Daily Prompt elves are trying minimalism today? I don't like it. I do, however, like the prompt - I surmise that they are asking for my preference on the places they have listed. First off, forests: I dislike them, because who knows what creepy-crawlies live there. Also, despite the fact that I'm…

The Hidden Road

I'm not generally one to get lost. I can navigate myself around quite well. Give me street names and landmarks and if I'm familiar with the area I can deliver you to the door, if I'm so inclined.So this one time, I found out about a bookstore. I guess you'd call it a 'mom and pop…

On Coming Home

When I was twelve, we'd just returned to City X after several years away. 'We' is my parents and I. I turned twelve a few months after the move, actually. My schoolmates marked the day in a fairly different way to my old school - it was very quiet. The other school had done a communal…

Refusal to Clone

Well, the prompt wants me to clone something from somewhere else and bring it to my hometown.I refuse. Here's a thing my English lecturer once said: that influence is immoral, because then the influencee is never truly forming their own sense of self. Granted it was in relation to a novel but the principle I…