Turpin Time

Today is going to be a good day. We are making a trip to a place called a resort where my brothers, all seven of them, five sisters and I, have been promised cold soda and hot dogs. It is going to be a special occasion; our parents have been married for a long time but to be honest, I’m not totally sure how long. I’m looking at my oldest brother Jonas who has some hair on his face and I know you must be pretty old to be allowed to grow that. I figure they must have been married for about nineteen or twenty years anyway.

We have gathered together before we leave to take a photo. I have my blue tee shirt on with a large number 6 showing on the front. On my right is number 7, Josephine, and towering above me on my left is 5, otherwise known as Ezra. The bright light takes some time to adjust to before I can look at a camera head on and I worry that I might be caught with an upside-down smile if I’m caught off guard. Daddy can get mad if any of us spoil things. My favourite thing to do when I come up from down below is breathe in a big nose full of air. Today I smell some freshly cut grass, the hint of the exhaust fumes from the garbage truck down the street and the remains of something that smells like warm coffee.

Before we have dinner we go into another room and our parents give us our outfits to wear for the night. It’s a pinky-purply coloured dress that comes to just below my knees and with short sleeves like puffy marshmallows. I don’t love it but maybe Adele will look better in it. Or Ruth. All seven of us have the same dress so there’s a good chance that at least one of us is going to look good in it. Lots of people sneak a look at all of us together, some even try to quickly grab a photo. "Hi hun, you look just like my daughter did when she went out with her ten-year old friends to that Frozen movie," says a lady. I am sixteen.

The soda tastes delicious; I don’t know how long it will be before I will be able to taste it again. They keep on dancing for a little while longer. The music they’re dancing to seems familiar and I recognise it when I put my hands over my ears, the dull thud and muffled voices the same ones I hear when stuck down in the basement not far from number 9. I discovered some of the links in the chains can make the same sounds as the song if I hit them the right way. If you heard us all together humming in a damp space only lit by a child’s night light it would be easy to think we wanted this. It’s the only way I can keep the memory of that soda and hot dog alive in my mind.



Andrew Hawkey

Me, Nigel

I am king of all I can see, head honcho, Mr Big. Right up to the farthest horizon, over the glittering expanse, I am the boss. Me, Nigel. Who would have thought! A windy paradise – a bit desolate maybe but it suits me fine. I’ve been here nearly two years now and it’s just got in my blood. I think I’ll stay here forever.

Not that I thought I’d stay long when I first arrived. It seemed so quiet, even a bit creepy. There were a lot of others here already but they didn’t have much to say for themselves. In fact, they were quite standoffish. Never welcomed me or even looked in my direction. Blimmin’ rude. Seemed a bit weird but at least they are still here, committed to the place you might say. They are good neighbours, really quiet. Actually, they hardly make any noise at all . . . or even move around much. At first, I wondered if they were okay – I spent a lot of time peering at them and getting quite close up but they weren’t bothered at all. Just ignored me. I wouldn’t mind a bit more action, especially when the nights get longer and there’s time to kill. Oh well, you can’t have everything. I call them family.

I’ve taken quite a fancy to one young stunner in particular. She’s everything I could want in a mate – so stable and solid, always there for me, a real looker. I think we have a future together – I’ve even built us a love nest, not that she seems that grateful. I’ve tried to make my feelings known but she’s a bit cold. Playing hard-to-get probably. But you never know, maybe one day we will hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

Hang on . . . what’s happening!? I can’t believe it! Who do they think they are? Three of them. Who said they could drop in, as though they own the place. Making so much noise. Can’t they shut up!? This place isn’t big enough for all of us. I’m not going over there, they can stick to their patch. I’m staying put.

Don’t they know who I am? I am Nigel, gannet king of Mana Island.




Rachael Hawkey



This is inspired by the recent strange story of Nigel, the gannet of Mana Island:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/100393801/gannet-with-a-heart-of-stone-hes-got-live-company-but-he-prefers-a-concrete-decoy

Skirts

Hot metal scorches her bum through her denim shorts. Below the frayed cut-offs, her thighs are turning pink.

I’ll get really burnt, then they’ll be sorry.

She looks back over her shoulder towards the house. Her aunt drains the vegetables and watches through the steam.

Just a sulky teenager - that’s what she’ll be thinking.

Her dad walks across the yellow grass. She draws her finger through the gritty dust on the car boot, writing her name. She wants him to get mad, so he will lay down the law. Tell her to grow up or stop behaving like a brat.

“What’s up?” The frustration of his kindness, of needing to explain, makes her throat ache. “You’re getting burnt. How about putting on a skirt to stop it getting worse?”

It’s a nice try. She’s almost grateful.

“What difference does it make to her what I’m wearing? It’s just stupid. She won’t even see my shorts when I’m sitting down.” She turns her head again and catches a glimpse of her grandmother’s white hair. “Anyway, I didn’t bring a skirt.”

She can feel the pout in her lower lip; she bashes the tail-light with her heel.

Her father sighs and returns to the house. She knows she'll be blamed if the 70th birthday is ruined. Attention will be drawn to her cousins’ good behaviour, to their matching floral skirts and pink blouses. New, just for the occasion.

Her uncle steps outside and whistles for the wee kids. They come running from behind the hen house and he barks at them to wash their hands. He walks towards her, carrying something. It’s a skirt. Indian print, wrap around. He drops it on the boot and, lighting a cigarette, leans his elbows on the roof of the car. He squints his eyes against the glare of the paint work.

“I remember my granddad getting cross twice.” So quiet, like he’s talking to himself, and she has to strain to hear. “Both times with me. Once I scratched his car with my bike handle. The other time I had an argument with Mum and made her cry. The thing is, that’s what I remember first when I think of him. Makes me sad, that’s all.”

He drags on his cigarette and she smells the sweet smoke as he exhales. She waits for him to speak again but all she can hear is the chatter of the wee kids and chairs scraping on the kitchen floor. Someone drops a piece of cutlery.

“Dinner’s up,” her aunt calls from the window. She stares and her mouth is grim.

The car rocks as he pushes himself upright, dropping his cigarette on the dusty ground and grinding it with his shoe.

“Up to you. Worth an upset? It’s just a skirt.”

He punches her lightly on the arm and walks back to the kitchen. Her aunt looks at him and he shrugs.

Inside, cutlery clatters against plates. A cork pops and her grandmother shrieks.

She slides off the boot and wraps the skirt over her shorts.



Rosemary McBryde

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

‘Half of bloody humanity is extinct,’ he expostulated. ‘That doesn’t bother you?’

He hunched over and dribbled saliva into the little vial.

‘Gone – like the dodo, like the bloody elephant soon enough. Just an idea. An emptiness. Nothing.

‘Imagine the people in the next flat, a different species!’

‘Subspecies,’ she mumbled.

‘Perhaps, but imagine the world now if the Smiths next door were Neanderthals. What are we stuck with instead as relatives? Bloody bonobos and chimpanzees – one too busy humping his aunty, the other too busy inventing murder, but both too busy to bother learning to speak, both unable to tell us anything about the world from a different perspective. We have to fall back on Trumpian racism – have to pretend that it’s a profound difference if someone speaks Spanish: “Excuse me, what is the world like from the viewpoint of a poor Mexican?”

‘Imagine the real, profound difference it would make to have two species of intelligent creatures living together here. It’s not that long ago.

‘You know they were more intelligent than us? They were bigger and stronger and smarter than us and we killed them all. What does that tell you? That sapiens sapiens was the nasty one, the brutal one. We are descended from the genocidal monkey.

‘And yeah, we screwed them literally as well as figuratively. So yeah, everyone who isn’t an African has Neanderthal DNA.’

‘But not everyone cares,’ she said, staring out the window at the rain.

He slipped the vial into the package and sealed it. 23andme.com/dna-ancestry.

He zipped his raincoat, put the package in the pocket and walked out the door.

She picked up the book lying open and face down beside his chair: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac.

Effing Beats. ‘Deadbeats’ more like it.

She flipped the book over:

I lay there staring sadly at the burlap ceiling. It was our last night, we both felt it.

… He brought me my supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food. ‘Just think, Ray, what it was like right here on this hill where our shack stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man. And do you realize that they say in the sutras there was a Buddha of that time, Dipankara?’

‘The one who never said anything!’

‘Can't you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything?’


Dhiraja

Becoming vegan

Ambrose sat down in the grass under the tall trees, their papery leaves ashiver in the air above. The herd stood about or grazed quietly.

The calves were six months old. When he had seen them first they were tiny, frisking creatures with fuzzy, cat-like tails. They had seemed unsure of what to do with their tails, waving them randomly in the air. Now the calves were about two-thirds the size of their mothers, burly and solid but with touches of babyishness apparent from certain angles.

Ambrose had sat for five minutes when one of the calves – the golden, gingerbread one with a white face (was it wrong to think of him as Baby Siegfried?) – approached and nuzzled his elbow and licked his arm. Once, vigilant mothers would not permit Ambrose to get closer than the shelter of trees at the far end of the paddock – their alert and fearsome stare forbade anything more. With a high-stepping trot they would gather their children around them in a herd about the bull – twenty-four mothers, twenty-four children, one huge Hereford bull, his lips pulled back and his nose wrinkled.

Now they all placidly grazed around Ambrose’s seated figure.

As Ambrose sat there, a calf occasionally broke from eating the grass and returned to its dark mother to nurse, and she, with infinite solicitude and affection, would bathe her large child with her tongue – his head and neck and behind his ears. The calf would lick her nose once in return.

The dictionary houses millions of words, but without the least possible hesitation I wish to say that the word ‘mother’ remains unparalleled in terms of sweetness, love, concern, intimacy, closeness and oneness. There is no other word as significant as ‘mother’. The mother is affection, the mother is love, the mother is concern, the mother is closeness, the mother is inseparable oneness.

The Hereford bull surveyed all. His head was giant and woolly. Patriarch, author and authority, calm in assurance.

Most of the cows were Angus, but Baby Siegfried’s mother was an isabela-white-coloured lady with twisted horns.

It was a tableau of archetypes, paradigmatic, heraldic and profound. Ambrose thought of huge, wooden sculptures by David Nash:

… a threefold power dynamic plays out: the block at base supports the entire composition, over it, the middle section develops a ‘receiving gesture’ while from above, in an ‘arriving gesture’, a fervently wished-for dispensation pours down. In Nash’s imagination, this is how father, mother and child are united. In surging unification, all three form a simultaneity of opposites and within that, a comprehensive, precisely calibrated life metaphor.

Most cows are impregnated by a rubber-gloved veterinarian. Most cows have their babies dragged away within 24 hours of birth and most of those tiny creatures are killed three days later – alone, discarded waste products of industry – the rest kept alive in shivering groups drinking from a bucket. We have need of your mother’s milk.

Ambrose sat on the grass, the calm sound of grazing around him.


Barnaby McBryde

Family Tree

I held his hand as we entered the pastel blue house, the interior of my childhood home almost bringing me to tears as my mind flooded with memories from my younger years. He felt it, too, as he gripped my hand a little bit tighter and smiled brightly at me.

“I missed coming back home with you, sis,” He says, his eyes glittering as a smirk danced on his lips.

“Did you miss teasing me about my boyfriends or stealing all of the snacks I packed?” I counter, making him laugh and turn away from me.

“Hi, Ma,” he greets our mother, embracing her tightly. “Did you miss your favourite child?”

“HEY! You two aren’t her favourite, I am!” Nat screams in dismay, running down the stairs. We all laugh at this, seeing her face scrunch up and turn a light shade of pink as her eyes glare at my brother. My mother strides towards me, pulling me in for a hug. My brother picks Nat up and puts her on his shoulders, letting her legs dangle across his chest before sprinting to the backyard.

“He hasn’t changed,” I comment in a whisper, audible for my mother’s ears only. She rolls her eyes and nods before the doorbell rings. A sly smirk made its way to my mother’s red lips, a twinkle starting in her eyes. She motions by jerking her head for me to open the door and greet our unexpected guest.

“Harrison?” I mutter in surprise as I look outside the window. I open the door to greet him, and am immediately brought to an embrace.

“Hello!” His voice is warm and loud, making my heart flutter. “It’s been a while since we’ve last met!”

I try and fail to muster a single word as Harrison walks past me to embrace my mother. They start talking about something, my brain not quite able to decipher the exchange of words currently occurring as tingles run down my spine. My brother enters the living room, Nat still on his shoulders. His eyes go wide when he spots Harrison and dart towards me, a grin appearing as he shakes Harrison’s hand firmly.

“Harrison! Nice surprise, seeing you here!” My brother greets before turning to me. “A very nice surprise.”

“I swear, I come with good intentions,” Harrison jokes, giving my brother a light punch on the arm. My mother swiftly leaves the room to the kitchen and takes out the roast turkey to put on the dining table. She urges us to join her and sit down, a suggestion with which we have no trouble complying.

“Say grace, Matt?” My mother asks my brother, clasping her hands together and bowing her head.

“Lord, thank You for providing us food and allowing us to gather here to praise and worship You. May we use the blessings You have bestowed upon us to live by your word. Please help Harrison and Octavia to finally get together and make many Christian babies. In Your name, we pray. Amen.”

I kick him from under the table, his mouth already stuffed with turkey and potatoes. He shrugs at me as if he was an innocent saint, making my blood boil.

“Well, sis,” Matt starts after he finishes swallowing, making all of us turn to him. “We all know Harrison came here today to expand our family tree.”


Katya Tjahaja

Family Time

“Yes honey, at 4:30pm. That’s when we’ll have dinner. What are you bringing?”

“What do you want, Mom?”

“Well I was thinking about beef stroganoff?”

“Sure. I”ll bring that.”

“Great! Don’t follow that old recipe though – remember, I don’t like sour cream. Too much fat.”

“Mom. Stroganoff has sour cream.”

“But I never use sour cream in it and it turns out just fine.”

“OK. Stroganoff without the sour cream. Anything else?”

“A salad perhaps?”

“OK…”

“Without lettuce. You know I don't like lettuce.”

“Right. What kind of salad would you like then?”

“A caesar salad is always nice…”

“Without lettuce??”

“Of course, honey. The way it’s usually done.”

“Mom – caesar salad is done with romaine lettuce.”

“Can’t you use something else?

She tried not to sigh too audibly.

“Sure. I’ll try. What’s everyone else bringing?”

“I don’t know – I haven’t asked them to bring anything. You know your brother doesn’t like to cook, and his wife certainly can’t…”

“Really? I think they’re great cooks!”

“Every time they bring something I have to throw it out. Too rich.”

“Who else is coming?”

“No one, just us as usual for the new year.”

“Ok. I’ll see you then, Mom.”

“Looking forward to our family time!” she chirped before hanging up.

It was four years ago to the day since they had had that conversation, and she remembered it like yesterday as she took the meat out of the refrigerator.

“Stroganoff, Mommy? Are we having stroganoff?”

“Yes, honey, our usual new year meal.”

“Yay! I can’t wait!”

“Hey hon, here’s the sour cream,” he said as he kissed her cheek. His skin was cold from the winter air.

“For what?” she asked.

“The stroganoff,” he said.

“I don’t use sour cream.”

“But sweetheart, stroganoff has…..” he trailed off as he saw her eyes well with tears.

“Right. Your Mom’s stroganoff. You know we’ll have to find a different name for that, right?” he teased.

She smiled as he wiped the tear from her cheek.

“Family time!” she called, and they all came running.



Jasmin Webb

January

Welcome to another year of short short stories. If you are new, this is the third year of the writing project where anyone who likes to write can contribute a story of 300 - 500 words. There's a given starter idea which you can use as a theme or a passing reference.

Previous years' stories can be found here: 2017 and 2016.

So, here we go. The starter idea for January 2018 is Family Time. Email your stories to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 31 January.

Happy writing!