I’m delighted to announce a new piece of creative writing, …and Coltrane Played, written between myself and my fabulous co-author, and the love of my life, Gina Maria Manchego, is now available at Collaborature. This is a wonderful magazine that prints stories, poems and more, always written collaboratively between two people. Very unique.
Collaborature To work jointly with others writing in prose or verse.
A short prose that blends music and love, I hope you enjoy our contribution: …and Coltrane Played
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider a small donation to help further my writing life. Thank you for reading Richard
A big thank you to editor, Manuela Timofte, for publishing my latest short prose, Separated at Birth. Please take a look at the other wonderful poetry and prose on the site. Gobblers by Masticadores never disappoints. Here
Twins set apart by time and tide, yet close enough to touch. This is our meeting as if from thin air. This is the face on a screen. Here, we linger, the two of us, interacting with a world that neither understands us nor wishes to. We say the right things, act as others, but remain remote. As hermits in a world made social, where everyone and everything is a supposed friend, we become just this.
We feel each other. Our words mean more when felt, not just spoken to appease. Those with poor memories see through such things, for lies are abhorrent to the cerebrally challenged, whereas truths are undoubtedly solid. Even when the pain strikes us both, we remain true to this. When it grows worse, we never falter. When one hurts, so does the other. If one resists weeping, the other blinks back the tears. As if affixed by a very long string, one tug is felt no matter the distance. Two tugs makes the other one topple; I don’t like to see her fall.
This is us, just eyes in a glass face, and voices powered by electronics. It ought not to work, but it does. It ought not to mean so much, but it couldn’t mean more. Twins, some might call us, separated at birth. She touches the screen and I touch it back. I know the pain in her head is as bad as mine, but a pain shared is a pain halved, mother says. Apparently, hers says the same.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider a small donation to help further my writing life.
A big thank you to editor, Manuela Timofte, for publishing my latest poetry piece, Been and Gone. This one’s a little different in that it’s a collaboration with my co-author and the girl who is my universe, Gina Maria Manchego. I hope you enjoy.
Steel ribs cage the beast. Burst free, my enemy! Reveal yourself to the world! A ridiculous proclamation born of a ridiculous man. I splutter out like a wetted candle. Exertion meets exhaustion, as steam rises like ghosting breaths. Only the melancholy escapes, grey plumes of inner me. The shell remains untouched, unlike the damaged mind which reaches tendrils of self deep under a paper epidermis to ink out everything they touch. Dark, they are, seeking crimson warmth and love, an extension to this endless pain. A revelation. A blunt gift. The inner me is my enemy. I repeat this patient mantra. But the cage is unbending and the will behind it raw. After all, is passing not for blurring speedsters, or those avoiding the view? I have neither a view nor the time in which to travel. This heart thuds an agreement when I would wish It a stone-cold death.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider a small donation
I’ve now been writing for a long time, and it gets harder to manage each year. So, in an unusually technological step, ‘for me, anyway’, I’ve opened a ko-fi donation page. Every little helps to fuel the dream. I shall try my best to post some really good short stories and the like as a thank you.
Here is a short fiction about time and its passing.
Unnecessary Adjustments
Pain and anger. Neither holds sway. Every tick both antagonises and coagulates in equal measures.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I dissipate in perfectly well-measured moments. Not a one longer than the next, nor the last. Like the clacking Newton’s Cradle with its five silver balls, the one positioned exactly central on my wooden desk beneath the workshop window, they regulate my demise. I hope I aren’t the ball in the middle. I prefer the outside and a quicker escape.
Demise? A bit dramatic, I hope.
I know all these facts. There is nothing else to know, only this: Who regulates said demise? That’s what I want to know. Need to know. Have to know! I cast my mind back, but it comes back clueless.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The first few days are an adjustment. The rest of the week is an experience. Week two gathers the information listed above. Week three adds momentum. This isn’t because of things changing — they never change — just to my resolve hardening. If I’m going down, I’m taking my tormentor down with me. Big talk for a man who’s never thrown a punch in his life.
I count everything from the bird calls in the presumed morning to the chirping cicadas in the expected night. The minutes of each day become an exact science. Food and drink aren’t involved; I’ve had neither since my arrival. The spectral fog that fills the room as drips of moist mist intensify; it is the only thing that has changed. So, this is where I will have him, or them, whichever applies, and shall practise at least a degree of revenge.
The whitening light becomes my fixation, the semi-permanent darkness an ignored anomaly.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I tire. This is the truth of it. I have let my guard down just once.
She appears like an oncoming vehicle in a car’s fogging headlights. A smudge. A shape. Darkness where lightness has roamed. This is her entry into my nightmare. Not a man at all!
“Who…?”
“You know my name,” she breezes.
I freeze. I do know it. I just kind of hope she doesn’t know mine.
“Come,” she says.
“Must I?”
“You did well. Better than most. What others fail to accept, you have adapted to in carefully observed increments.”
“I ticked into death.”
“Ticked towards Death,” she corrects.
“How…?”
“Best you don’t ask. Just know I’ll take care of you. That’s all that matters at the end.”
End! I aren’t in total agreement with this, but what choice do I have?
So, I take her proffered, skeletal hand and allow her to lead me away from the light in a total reverse of all the presumed theories. It hurts not one bit.
The ticking stops.
The other side requires no adjustments. I roam free. I glide. Time and space and family and life and death, all such real-world things are pointless here. No adjustments required. No tweaks at all.
For a clockmaker, it is quite the revelation.
End
As always, thank you for reading, and for your continued support.
I’m delighted to have been featured in the latest issue of Viridine Literary Magazine. The Savage Coast, a micro literary fiction, is now available as one of many great reads in Issue 2. Out now!
A freak collision, they said. The full moon now resembled a half-eaten cake. Something had gouged out its left flank, leaving the celestial giant lopsided and broken.
It didn’t hurt us. A blessing, some argued. When the fallen moon crushed Australia like a custard pie dropped from a plate, the rest of the world got lucky. So they thought.
Wolves hunted. Bats skittered. Vampires bit. The creatures of the night attacked. They were lost, you see. Lost without it. I know, for the moonlight was all that calmed me and now there was none. A werewolf forever, mayhem was mine.
Crinkled thoughts attempt to unfurl Words and letters – damn this ruination! Divided by force, separated Folded in upon themselves Mountainous in their minuteness Kissing the wrongness of the misplaced Meeting parts of me I’d rather they’d not Meeting the worst, as there is no best Who am I kidding? Crinkled thoughts can never unfurl
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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