Mondays Finish the Story is a flash fiction challenge by Barbara W. Beacham. Here is my story for this week’s prompt in the first sentence below and in reference to the above picture.
Zeus was not having a good day and he made sure everyone knew it. Mack was a mess as soon as Zeus got going.
“Get me a cleaver…”
“Nooooo! Pleease! Oh god – I’m sorry!” Mack sobbed and gurgled as I ran to boss’s collection for a blade. I almost dropped it; my legs could barely keep up.
As Zeus’ knuckles tightened to white around the knife handle, I desperately avoided his predatory gaze, leering at me through the lightning bolt tattoo across his right eye.
“Now, get out” he growled. I didn’t linger.
Mack had hidden Zeus’s package as well as the money. He lied. I warned him that Zeus would not buy it. The kid messed up.
I wondered why you’d risk losing some fingers for a few bucks, and then I heard a chop. Mack’s screams battered the walls of the warehouse, and the echoes shook my bones. I guess you never quite get used to working for a psychopath.
Johnny Robles an artist, creates cool street art in the streets of Miami. With a mixture of cartoon and pop style drawings and graffiti techniques, he gives color to the streets. Residents say they love it..and so do I.
Featured here at work where some of his cool stuff happens.
Are Australian short story writers an endangered species?
I found this review by Geoffrey Dean, an accomplished Tasmanian (Australian) writer quite interesting especially while editing some of my short stories for competitions recently.
I enjoy writing short stories, ranging from “Mondays Finish the Story” (Barbara W. Beacham) flash fiction challenge of 100-150 words to stories I have written in 1500 to 3000 words in our Creative Writing Workshop with Isabel D’Avila Winter. In short story competitions, the limit to the number of words you are required to write can really change a story, as I have found recently while reducing one of my 1500 word short stories to 1000 words for a competition. I have felt in the past week that I probably could have spent less time and written a better story, if I wrote a completely new story. On the other hand, I found it much easier to increase the number of words of another short story from 800 words to the required number, 1000 words. The additional 00 words may have slowed the phase of the story, but it is work-in-progress.
Submitting to literary magazines also calls for a fit. You have to write to specific requirements with type and paragraphing or head-lining, but the main challenge is the number of words to fit a page or a column. So how can you fit into the system? Can you be less descriptive or reduce the number of characters without taking from your plot or could you do without long passages of back-stories without killing the story?
In the following review, “Are Australian short story writers an endangered species?”, see how author Geoff Dean writes about his process of creating a short story and his discussions on the steps that took him to the end where the answer about short stories and their lengths are quite clear. As Dean writes, one must always aim to write a good short story first and foremost before trying to fit the story “into the system”, i.e., the magazine page size or competition requirements…in other words, to hell with the system, I am going to write my story my way and eventually find a place for it.
Geoffrey Dean has published 80 short stories. The Tasmanian Writers’ Centre (TWC) in conjunction with Island Magazine and the Geoff and Elizabeth Dean Foundation have just launched the Geoffrey Dean Short Story Competition which is now open to Australian writers.
Born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1928, Geoffrey Dean (Geoff) had his first short story published in the mid-1950s. Scores of his stories have appeared in eight collections of his work (Mysteries, myths, and miracles; Under the Mountain; The Literary Lunch; Strangers Country and other stories; Cold Dean Monday and other Australian stories; Summerbird and other stories; Over the Fence; and the Hadlee Stories), as well as magazines, anthologies and collections in Australia, the UK, USA, Norway and China. He won many literary prizes and awards, including the State of Victoria Short Story Award and the Arafura Literary award. His story, The Town that Died was made into a TV drama and broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986. Geoff died in August, 2011.
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If the blind can read with their fingers, with braille, scientists say they can also teach the deaf to hear with their tongues.
Tongue Mapping Research at Colorado State University has found that a new device works similarly to a cochlear implant, but where an implant sends electric impulses to the auditory nerve where the brain recognizes these impulses as useful information, CSU’s device sends these impulses to a mouthpiece packed with electrodes via Bluetooth. By pressing their tongue against the mouthpiece, users can feel impulses as tingling or vibration. Researchers hope that with training the brain will be able interpret specific patterns as words, effectively turning a tongue into ears.
Here is a draft of a potential chapter. I may use it in the memoir, but the story was prompted by Isabel D’Avila Winter in my creative writing workshop last week for the biggest lie I have ever told. I have not shared any memoir pieces lately, because I have not been writing much, but here it is for my readers who enjoy the memoir stories on Tribalmysticstories.
The Chinese kerosene lamp burnt low. It was close to me and I smelt the kerosene cut into floral smells from the freshly washed bed sheet. In a continuous dance, its golden-yellow flame peaked in a steady poise and melted into the dark head of the small metal lamp. The lamp was barely taller than my school ruler but it gave enough light for me to see the print. The flame in the round clear glass, size of an orange, outlined the specs of paprika stains on the lamp. At the same time, the flame threw a soft orange ambiance under my sheet and even around the room.
If I moved too quickly, I could knock the lamp over and burn myself because the lamp was partially under the sheet, and next to my book I was reading. This was my private and peaceful space where I read my books. This was also against Mother’s rules.
Having a lamp to myself was a luxury I rarely had in a noisy, crowded house. My mother and I had a small room about three by three metres and my older uncle (of two uncles) and his wife shared another larger room with their five children. My grandmother and aunty shared the last one. My younger uncle was away at the University of Technology, about 20 minutes from my village. My uncle was the first man from our village to go to university.
It was a house where everyone knew everything that was going on. My family had this one Chinese lantern to use as an inside lamp and one Coleman lamp as the outside lamp. Both lamps burnt on ‘kero’ as the villagers referred to kerosene. Fire was the main source of light and there was a torch, which hardly had batteries because no one could afford them. The torch was mostly used for travelling between the village houses. It was also used to visit my aunts and uncles or for going to the pit toilet away from our house – not for reading or using as a room light. If we left the village to fish or camp, the Coleman and the torch came with us.
I knew I was using the 20 cents kerosene up but I was solving a mystery with Nancy Drew. I liked being a detective myself.
“Ampom” mother called and without saying, I knew she called me for dinner. She used one of my names that meant, light-skinned.
“Ok” I said, without moving.
In the village, kero sellers would buy wholesale in 44-gallon drums in Lae City and retail the kerosene to us in re-cycled wine or spirit bottles – charging 20 cents per bottle. It eventually became 50 cents and then a $1. That was in 1970s. Wholesalers bought kero from service stations and general stores. My cousin and I would take our bottle, a clear Vodka re-cycled bottle, and I did not remember which of my uncles drank the Vodka – to any village retailer for kero. We stood there while they pumped the kerb into our bottle but there was a special technique where the boys in the village mastered. The pump would be pressed a couple of times and stopped. The air would push the blue liquid from the drum through the transparent pump into our re-cycled bottle. You have to stop the pump quickly or it sprayed the kero everywhere. I always thought it was cool and I wanted to have a go at pumping the kero this way.
At home, every night, once the kero was put into our Coleman lamp and some in the Chinese lamp – my family gathered in our blackened old kitchen and ate their dinner.
The floor was uneven and with the weathered timber leaving gaps in between, we dropped the bones of chickens and pork to the village dogs and pigs, which fought over it. Sometimes the fights would become too aggressive and the animals would run into the fragile posts so it felt like the kitchen would drop off the side of the main house. My cousins and I would get scolded for dropping our scraps down the timber gaps. Tonight, my family were only a few metres away from me separated by a couple of walls. I turned the lantern wick higher for more light. I adjusted my bed.
Most of the kapok had fallen out or shrivelled in my pillow so I tucked some clothes under it and raised my head. I reached up with my book and turned the pages.
I knew Mother would place my food on the bench top, near the hot teapot, so it will stay warm. Sometimes grandma would place the covered food at the fireplace and they both would insist I go out and eat before bed. Both mother and daughter always respected my reading and schoolwork, but sometimes, my mother would agitate me with her calling. On this night, I wanted to finish my book.
“Ampom!” Mother called.
“Yes” I answered, annoyed.
“Come and eat”.
“I will”.
“Come now, the food is getting cold.”
“I am coming soon”. I turned to the next page and read faster. This was not fun, but I tried to go as fast as I could without skipping any pages.
A few minutes later, mother called again and I could tell she was getting angry. I was not ready to eat. I did not answer. I removed and turned the wick on the Chinese lamp so low, the room became dark. I shut my eyes and put Nancy Drew away. I was annoyed at my mother. I was hungry but only to find out what had happened in the story.
“Ampom!” I heard mother yell. I did not answer her.
Mother rose from the floor in the kitchen, and I heard her march to our bedroom.
She opened the door by pushing hard against the grating sand on the floor. The door did not have a lock. I had shut my eyes and twisted my body into an awkward position and pretended I was asleep.
Mother started calling my name and sat down and tried to shake me. I did not move.
“Ampom!, Ampom!,”
Mother lifted my shoulders and my head rolled back as if I was unconscious or dead. I was supposed to pretend I was asleep, but somehow, the idea of being dead entered my head – so I went with it.
“Ampom, tisa, tisa” – Mother begged in Bukawa for me to wake up.
“Giuc – Giuc!” mother started calling her sister. My aunt was shocked by the tone of my mother’s voice and tried to ask my mother what was going on. There was no time for mother to explain. By now my mother became hysterical and started calling her own mother for help because she thought I was dead.
In minutes – everyone rushed into the small space on my bed and started pulling my hair and calling all my four names. They would throw cold water on me next to try to wake me.
I finally ‘woke’ up to the relief of my mother – who was already crying. I told Mother I lied and I was pretending to be asleep and she did not believe me. I told her; I only wanted to have some peace and quiet – and even some light to read my book. Being a nurse, she was not convinced so she gave me a thorough check up; feeling the temple, checking the eye-balls, checking the ear and the throat. And then, I had no choice but to go outside and eat.
A colorful dragon head made of clay was found in a palace at Xanadu. Credit: Photo courtesy Chinese Cultural Relics
The remains of three colorful dragon heads made of clay have been discovered in a huge palace in Xanadu, a city constructed by the grandsons of Genghis Khan. Scientists reported that the dragons were made of fine, red, baked clay and were attached to the ends of beams and used as decoration. They “are lifelike and dynamic” and “have yellow, blue, white and black coloring” glazed on them, researchers wrote.
The palace where the dragon heads were discovered, sprawls over 9,000 square meters (about 100,000 square feet), or nearly twice the floor space of the modern-day White House. Archaeologists have been excavating the palace, learning how it was designed and decorated.
Inspired by a true-life adventure, Headhunt Revisited: With Brush, Canvas and Camera is a documentary film, a book and exhibition about Caroline Mytinger and the power of her art to build connections across oceans and decades.
Caroline Mytinger: by Michele Westmorland (Images of research materials from the Monterey Museum of Art or Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology)
The inspiration for Headhunt Revisited took shape in the 1920’s, when an intrepid American portrait artist, Caroline Mytinger, and her friend, Margaret Warner, traveled to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands on a hunt to capture portraits of the indigenous peoples. Their four-year expedition resulted in 25 stunning paintings that depicted and preserved the culture of Melanesia in a way recorded by no other.
Picture: Google images – Executive Protection Business
I was introduced to this new way of story-telling in our creative writing workshop this week and I loved it. It is new to me, but some of you may already know about Donald Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard” and how this work told that story.
As a former journalist I was used to asking the questions, collecting all the answers and then writing the story from the answers. I found it fascinating that you can tell almost a whole story by only asking questions. I found this technique much nicer in listening to the podcast, rather than trying to read the questions. The one below, introduced to me by Isabel D’Avila Winter in our creative writing workshop, Salman Rushdie reads Donald Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard“.
Storytelling
Salman Rushdie also discusses Concerning the Bodyguard with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. “Concerning the Bodyguard” was published in the October 16, 1978, issue of The New Yorker, and was collected in “Forty Stories.” Salman Rushdie’s most recent book is “Luka and the Fire of Life.”
The rarest kind of one of the world’s most common birds found in Melbourne
The rare white sparrow spotted in Melbourne. Photo: Bob Winters
The Age Technology reported a pure white sparrow, the rarest incarnation of one of the world’s most common birds, has been spotted in suburban Melbourne.
A regular visitor to select gardens in Sanctuary Lakes in Melbourne’s west, locals have nicknamed the bird the “little white angel”.
Keen bird watcher Bob Winters, who worked as an environmental educator for the Gould League for 20 years, says the sparrow is a “one in a million neighbour” with only a handful of white sparrow sightings reported worldwide.
A little creative genius lives with me and is sometimes called my younger son, Chris. He is over one 190 cm tall so he is not that little, but this 16-year-old always comes up with amazing ideas. One of his discoveries was how to magnify or shoot micro pictures with his iPhone using a recycled attachment from an old torch. Here are a couple of images Chris was excited to share with me for their artistic value – he deliberately softened the lines.
Chris Harris Picture. Bee. May 25, 2015
When I asked him what camera he had used to take the pictures, he showed me his phone and explained, he took apart an old torch and stuck a glass lens from the old torch on his iPhone camera lens to take the super micro images. I was so excited, we went everywhere in the garden to take more pictures from deep inside centre of petals to the eye-balls of family members so we could see the colour spectrums. It is quite incredible. The bee pictures are two of Chris’s images.
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