To be is the answer (if to be or not to be is the question)

I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve. I’m absolutely crap at hiding my feelings. Dad described this as the storm clouds gathering but he kindly qualified this by acknowledging that the sun would quickly shine again. So as the year draws to a close (well in 40 minutes to be exact) I hope that I can live with this version of myself in 2019 and ‘be’ rather than function in some well-behaved role, portraying a carefully edited life to those around me.

I knew early on in life that acting was not my gig. It’s hard to get excited about being cast (no pun intended) as a sheep in the Christmas nativity play, crawling on all fours up the centre aisle between the pews with the sheep-skin rug from our lounge tethered to my back. If this was not bad enough, there was singing involved and to make matters worse still, this had to be delivered in sheep-like vibrato,

“We’re shivering sheep and we daren’t go to sleep …” 

If there was one impromptu acting moment, however, it was the deathly glance directed towards my gloating older sister sitting in the pulpit behind the palm fronds, looking serene in blue and white as the highly-favoured one.

It would be easy to assume that my next starring role was looking up and travelling in the right direction. At least being a Wise man was bipedal. It is at this point that I need to declare another character flaw…a susceptibility to uncontrollable fits of giggles as a manifestation of performance anxiety. And what was the cause of such angst? Wearing borrowed silk pyjamas with sweat-stained armpits and delivering this clanger in melodic synchrony with my ever suffering younger sister.*

“Where is the babe born King of the Jews? No one is able to give us the news.”

Exit stage right, quickly.

In my teenage years I played a forlorn workhouse boy and low-life ruffian in Oliver!, a background role worth the waiting for.

And from humble beginnings playing a ruminant mammal I ended my acting career on a high as a Shepherdess on the Delectable Mountains pointing Pilgrim to the Celestial City of Gold. No bloomer bloopers thankfully!

I am content to leave my brief dramatic experiences in the past but cannot promise clement weather in the future. Bring an umbrella 😃

*Don’t ask her about the piano duet.

Sharon Hawkey

Ibsen's Ghosts

Not a bad face, Irene Stenhope thinks, as she deftly applies base make-up. She’s never been a beauty – always a Barrymore or Plowright rather than a Mirren. Her appearance is unremarkable, someone you would pass on the street and fail to recall a minute later. A blank canvas has been her blessing, more so than great beauty. It’s taken her from Ophelia, to Blanche, to Lady Macbeth. Irene darkens her eyebrows with expert strokes. Countless times, she’s added thirty years, shadow and pencils creating crow’s feet and lip wrinkles. Now she works to keep age at bay.

What’s the secret to being a great actress, her disciples ask, as they study her metamorphosis? They’ve come from schools where the art is taught by academics. Funded by student loans, they absorb the theory, get an A+ and a graduation ceremony, and a year later they’re making coffee and sending out audition tapes. Those with guts and talent make their own work; others gravitate to Sydney or London, and email when they get a walk-on in a sitcom, still yearning for the stage. It breaks her heart.

Irene gives thanks for that time when theatre was an event. People dressed up and a ticket was hot property. Forty years ago, Ibsen’s Ghosts was scandalous. A philandering husband, a syphilitic son, drunkenness and incest. Now such stories fuel the 24 hour news cycle and Irene understands why the audience doesn’t come. The tide has turned to spectacle and celebrity – the stadium concert, the A-list comedian – where the underbelly of human existence can be forgotten or mocked with numbing cruelty.

Irene dons Mrs Alving’s full period clobber one last time. The show is closing, they were told today. No four week season, no tour. It’s all there in the contract; it’s the company’s right. Sales are slow, the houses are thin.

What’s the secret to being a great actress, they ask? Technique, method? No, not even talent.  Irene knows that, more than the ability to fully inhabit the character, the art is to forget what you know. To forget the end of the story, to forget that the show is closing, to forget that the best years are behind. To step into the lights and towards an unknown future as if for the very first time.

Rosemary McBryde

Pania

They linked arms as they advanced towards the police lines.

Pania stood to one side. She held aloft a sign – it was not on a pole, she held either edge of
it over her head.

This is not the moment for the consideration of art history, Anthony scolded himself, but
amidst the fear that churned his mind was a cool corner that saw and analysed the sight.
The Shadow of Death was painted in the 1870s by William Holman Hunt. Pania’s stance
mirrored Christ’s in the painting exactly – he, stretching his arms up from carpentry work
and his mother aghast at the shadow cast on the wall, the shadow falling on a beam from
which tools hung – a shadow man crucified. The angle of her hips, the jacket tied around
her waist. The correspondence was uncanny. And chilling.

She it was who had said on RNZ after the Environment Court delivered its final decision
that she was willing to die. ‘We will remain here until the bulldozers come. I’ve already
planned to sacrifice my life for this campaign’.

It was as if she were the only real person there, the rest of them like characters in a short
short story – a flurry of drama and the book is closed – but for her this was real.

She was like a karearea – fierce and burning, with rage gleaming in its eye, beautiful and
wild in the sky or swooping remorselessly upon prey, but ultimately fragile – light, hollow
bones and delicate soft brown pinions. Could her rage prevail, could such purity resist the
seemingly relentless spread of injustice?

Anthony drew his elbows in, drawing closer to him Kayda Matsushita on his left and
Gerard on his right.

They staggered forward

‘Pigs in the dark,’ Anthony thought. The last dim light of the day just defined the silhouette of Otuataua Maunga to the west but the harsh white flood lights of the police position illuminated the advancing crowd starkly.

The lights, the line of them linking arms – we must look, thought Anthony, to the police like actors taking a last bow before the final curtain falls.

Dhiraja

Curtain call

They linked arms as they advanced towards the police lines.

Ambrose felt the adrenaline making his heart thump and his eyes widen. He drew his elbows in, drawing closer to those on either side of him.

‘It’s not so bad for you,’ he said to Kayda Matsushita on his right, ‘you’re a fictional character – you don’t have so much to lose.’

‘Dude,’ she replied coolly, ‘you’re only semi-non-fictional yourself. I’m not entirely sure you’ve been to Dakota at all.’

But Ambrose knew why he was here, arm-in-arm on the slopes of Puketepapa tanga a Hape: because he had been to Dakota and he had failed to do anything there but be scared. Failed though he had seen God Himself there. He had, in his own estimation at least, failed to ‘stand with Standing Rock’. Here he would stand to the end with the indigenous opponents of unfettered greed and consumption and destruction.

It was difficult to walk like this on such rough ground. The grass was long, and random volcanic rocks made maintaining the line a challenge.

To his left, Dr Cooper looked an unlikely radical, arm-in-arm on the other side with his ‘spouse equivalent’, but not as implausible as various Japanese monks and a lone Ethiopian who, though he might know more about revolution and violence than the rest of them, looked impossibly tall and thin amongst the mostly Maori crowd that moved as steadily as possible towards the police.

‘Pigs in the dark,’ Ambrose thought. The last dim light of the day just defined the silhouette of Otuataua Maunga to the west but the harsh white flood lights of the police position illuminated the advancing crowd starkly.

The lights, the line of them linking arms – we must look, thought Ambrose, to the police like actors taking a last bow before the final curtain falls.

Barnaby McBryde

The final curtain

There she was again tonight, bowing ever-so gracefully as she blew kisses towards the audience.

If only they knew, she thought. If only they knew…

The lights went out as the curtain was pulled in. She let out a sigh of relief, slouching her shoulders once more to return to the room behind the stage. Other people ran to quickly dispose of any unnecessary items and fold up the tables and chairs scattered across the black stage. No words were exchanged among them, not even a smile.

She closed the door behind her and sat down, grabbing a makeup wipe and ferociously rubbing off her white face and dark eyes to reveal a sad girl who smiled.

Unfortunately, there was no one else inside the room except for the little puppy who yawned lazily.

Where was she? The girl who wanted to pursue a career in making people laugh and cry, making an audience clap and smile as they watched her dance across the stage and recite the same lines she had rehearsed for months.

There was an emptiness in her that she was unable to shake away no matter how many times she got on that stage in front of a great crowd. Whether she was aware of this or not, the vacancy was eating her alive.

You did so well last night!

What a horrendous show!

She thinks she can act!

Your best performance yet!

The compliments and insults went through her as if she were nothing. She looked up into the mirror, her eyes meeting with the face of a stranger.

What happened to her? That girl, the one who would beg her parents to watch the same play every Saturday. The one who auditioned over and over again, coming ten minutes early to rehearsals every day.

She herself did not know.

She gathered her things and left. She was going to find that girl again.

This was her last performance, the final curtain.

Katya Tjahaja

Brian. Revisited.

 (A bonus November story)

Archbishop Brian sat in silence in his office, his hands cradling his face, the fingers brushing cheeks that resembled the sheen of his platinum coated iPhone broken only by irregular patches of light stubble like a well-used sheet of 150 grit sandpaper. The silky skin was not due to his usual expensive moisturiser created from Himalayan glacial water; instead it had been sustained during a farm rubbish fire that turned on him and left him with burns to his body. Following the initial emergency response, his recuperation involved maintaining his fluids and although in a private hospital room, his trips to the toilet were occasionally sabotaged by a faulty hospital-issued gown with a crucial tie missing from the rear. Within a short time he became known to a select few staff as the Arse-Bishop.

He lifted his head up and continued perusing the daily news on his tablet. The date stamp in the bottom corner reminded him another month had passed and he stood to turn over a new page on the wall calendar. The new month featured an image of whales gliding in Pacific waters off the East Coast and, as if in unison, the news page featured a story on a whale stranding.

He sat back and reflected on that night when his mighty God had shaken his fists upon the land and sea. Part-promotional for his flock, part-holiday and an opportunity to open the throttle on his 900cc machine, it was a miracle that he had avoided any serious mishap or injury.

“God spoke to me that night,” said the then Bishop to his full house of believers, “and he told me I should leave, for something bad was coming. His displeasure at the wickedness of man and his continual perversity, the moral decline, men marrying men, gays, lesbians, and kids choosing their gender. I will send a warning that cannot be ignored, I will make the heavens boom and the waters to part. God told me I should leave so that I can continue to spread his word!”

The faith of the congregation was galvanised in their slick-haired leader. God had talked to the Bishop and indeed spared him for a higher purpose. There was only one thing for it. Anoint him as an Archbishop.

His stomach now began to rumble and he thought about getting some sustenance, much as it had in the growing shadows of that early evening in the seaside town. He realised that there was little on offer other than some fish and chips and a bed in a motel that was far below a man of his stature should have to endure.

“Let’s get out of this shit-hole,” he said to his posse as they mounted their machines. His onboard phone had delivered the only voice to him in his helmet’s earpiece that night as his wife prattled on about something trivial as they headed out for the nearest southern city on the still unbroken road.



Andrew Hawkey

December

After 36 months and hundreds of stories, here we are at the final starter idea for the Short Short Story project. Thanks for writing and sharing your creativity. Thanks for being committed to the project. If you aren't a regular writer, I hope you've been enjoying the stories written by others.  Your starter for December is "The final curtain".

Stories to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com and let's make the deadline 21 December this time. There's enough to busy ourselves with after that.  Thanks again, and over and out.

Rosemary