Limpet clamped to rock
Centre of its universe
Cliffs irrelevant
Humans dice with death;
rocks only fall on others
’til they fall on you.
Eroded by wind and waves,
cliffs house skeletons galore.
Friday Fictioneers — Memory Stoked
The writing of my latest tome is taking longer than I expected, thus my urge to take a breather and take part in this week’s Friday Fictioneers challenge. Many thanks to Sandra Crook for the photo prompt and to our dynamo of a host, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.
My apologies for posting yet another excerpt from my novel Counting Magpies (last seen disappearing through a black hole into another universe, otherwise known as the publisher’s submissions backlog!).
Genre: Speculative fiction
Word Count: 100
~MEMORY STOKED~
Janice has never lived in a city akin to Warsaw, or witnessed multitudinous fire-gutted buildings, some with bodies inside. I trudge after her, weighted by a memory.
When I was seven years old the Mafia burnt down my favourite ice-cream parlour—some kind of turf war—with my friend, her older sister, father, and grandmother inside. Afterwards, I’d obsessed over visions of gallons of ice-cream melting into a rainbow stream that ran all the way out the door and down the road to forever, not to hell but to paradise. This fantasy was better than imagining the family incinerated alive.
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To read other Friday Fictioneers’ stories for this week, or to add a 100-word story of your own, please click on the blue frog below.
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Monday Morning #Haiku 186 — Mulch
Woodland winter damp
That aroma of leaf mulch
Rich nature unraked
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Book Review: Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
However difficult the subject, Jodi Picoult always delivers big-time. She has an incredible capacity to show all sides of the story from the different viewpoints of characters trapped in ethical dilemmas. She never moralises, or allows even an ounce of author intrusion. Instead, she takes the reader right into the heads and hearts of those characters who are telling the story.
Nineteen Minutes is about a sensitive boy who has to suffer years of bullying, which begins the day he starts nursery school and continues through the years until, at the age of 17, he snaps and goes on a shooting spree in his high school. His mother is a midwife who brings babies into this world and now her son has become a murderer. She never realised that he had a problem, so you can imagine where that takes her on the self-blame front.
Basically, this a story about a situation that is every parent’s idea of a nightmare. Told from the third person viewpoints of the main players, while moving backwards and forwards between different time strands, the author skilfully builds up detailed psychological and social profiles of these characters, plus taking the reader through the gathering of evidence for the court case that follows the shooting.
This is a long novel (nearly 600 pages), but well worth the read, albeit a galling one. It made me think deeply about contemporary society and the “in-crowd” versus those it excludes. It also made me glad that I’m the age I am and not having to go through school now, especially with the added pressure of social networking.
I found it very hard to put this novel down, but it left me exhausted afterwards and unable to settle to reading any other work of fiction straight after.
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Monday Morning #Haiku 183, 184 & 185 — January
January rain,
shimmering pathways, blank skies,
and a lone walker.
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January wind,
bending trees, lashing wetness,
and a happy dog.
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January days,
sleeping snails, stirring shoots,
and a hoe at rest.
Sarah Potter Writes 