Daddy Day Care

No babies were injured in the taking of this photo

Animals of Winter Prism

There are only a few people in my novel
But there are tons of animals

 

Its wings were orange, marked with black eye-like ellipses, tiger wings for bog safaris, the texture of a paper lantern when lit from behind by the sun. 

There they were, the foxes.  Three sets of eyes watching him through a veil of rain. 

 

 

He told the spider how secondary school is hard with all the changing rooms between classes for different subjects, how he gets lost because all the corridors look the same. 

 

 

The next morning the cows were restless in the shed, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.

 

 

A blubbing mess of kittens spills out before her. 

One, two, three, blind kittens sopping in a puddle.

 

 

 

The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft. 

 

 

When he was big he was going to make a house for the birds out of wood, so the robin that lived in the yard, that Granny said was Granddad, who had died before he was born, could live there. 

 

 

‘Goodnight moon, good night owl and goodnight rabbit,’ he said, to the rabbit from his porridge bowl who was in the middle of the lawn and had thrown him a blinking wave.

 

 

He crawled into the wardrobe to hide in the dark dark.  Under Granny’s fur coat that hung there for storage he howled to his pillow with all the anguish of wolves and for once it was the monsters that trembled at Kai.

and of course

 

 

A rook cawed in the tree.  Kai stared up at the treetops, rooks, jackdaws, ravens, corbies along with other birds he didn't recognise were gathering there together.  The branches of the trees were crowding with them. Their wings rattled and shook the leaves.  Their black beady eyes peered down on him praying.

novel excerpt
outtakes
 

Love cats

In Abyssinia we met as cats
Watched soft rain plop
tails swishing beneath a Palladian.
In plague scourged London
we scurried havoc, I was the
flea on your black rat’s back.
You held a door for me in Tokyo.
Our silhouettes danced when Magi fires burned.
We knew each other before we had names,
time together is breathing.

You were the rock pool, sun warm,
a child of aeons past I paddled in.
But I will never be the first snowdrop in Spring.
And you will never be the burning,
of fingers reawakening from the cold.

Does love seek,
the devastation, of a smashed Faberge egg,
the twist, of a knife blade in the innards,
Or the lulling eternity of a shell housed sea?

Writing Inspiration #3

Nature

It was still early morning. The sun blazed baldly like a lie its heat only beginning the journey down to earth. He stretched his arms up so his fingers tipped it in the sky.   Daddy smoked a cigarette and sipped tea from the flask.  They had a bar each even though they hadn’t done any work yet.  Daddy screwed the wrapper into a silver ball and flicked it on the ground.  Kai picked it up and put it in a plastic bag that was now their official bin. 

A lone call of distress came warbling across the bog.  It bubbled and wavered, spooky and sad. ‘That’ll be a curlew’ said John-Joe, Kai strained into the distance without seeing it.  He jumped on the spot to stop from shivering.

Then later

 Insects skated lazily across the scum surface of the ditch water. He poured water from his bottle to disturb the stagnant film.  It broke to drifting islands of filth. He examined his callouses, his split and bleeding finger joints and his blackened nails.  Sandwiches tasted better in the bog. 

Not Nature

Then the city, not its redbrick and cobblestone centre but its ring roads and tunnels, auto dealers and factories, storage depots and cranes, the giant containers strewn along the roadside to the docks.  The air was tangy with salt, not fresh like at the seaside but astringent, corroding the iron of the man made monsters bleeding them in rivulets of rust.

Writing Inspirations #2

Pinterest


Snow.  Kai’s nose above the blankets could smell it.  Fat, fluffy, flakes of snow in thick swirls that clung to the air.  He sat upright in bed and pulled aside the curtain to gaze out. He shivered slightly, with cold, with anticipation, his face pressed against the glass, his breath formed a fog on the pane and there it was.  The snow, lush on the lawn, and there was the world, white and clean, blunted by snow. 

Snow blanketed the hedge rows and fields, it made a shape of what was the car - it shrouded the truth of the farm.  Drifts lay heavily on bare branches and the snow was dense in the air still softly, silently and steadily falling. 

A caw, caw, cawing of crows echoed through the white wilderness of the day.

A mood board for my writing