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WritChal 24 (part 2...)

woah hi here we go again! i'm doing a writing challenge for this year with a lovely group of folks! big thanks to alice, and laura and everyone else for putting everything together. this is my second page since the last one was getting kind of monstrous (103 entries yowch). each week we pick a theme, and everyone has their own optional terms of engagement. i'm adapting these to be (with some modifications from the 1st half of the year...):

hoping the best for the second half of the year. thank u for being along for the ride :o)

find everyone else's work + weekly themes here!

directory

luminescence

spellcasting

author swap

scream

elf bozo

perspective

underground

author swap

diy

silhouette

starlight

author swap

real

rend

luminescence

09.08.24 - doomsdays

No one can say exactly when, but sometime this week, the shadows started to disappear. I heard someone say that it’s the ozone dissolving. That this is the Earth’s breaking point. Something else about mass hysteria, or that our eyes have been exposed to some chemical pollution. There’s a desperate grasp for reason despite what’s happening before our very eyes.
It slowly assails the whole of the sky. A stark and expansive white, as if the sun disagreed with the shape it was given. Blaring. There’s no other way to say it, this light does not shine. Here, on the ground, darkness indiscriminately saturates every surface. I've begun to rely on spatial memory alone to guide me through my home. The hum of the highway has left. You can almost see it, soon: the only shape is the silhouette in the skyline, blindness above and below. White and black.

spellcasting

20.08.24 - fireball practice

The air is warm, stale, heavy with the heath’s fetid breath. Lucky it’s not too long a walk to get away from everything, though I could do without the smell. I dig my feet into the slip, the tread on my boots holding tight to drowned grass. I breathe deeply.

The fizz starts in my hands, mana flowing at the buzz of potential. I let my fingers move as if being passed through a stream. The fizz: it’s bubbles in a flute of champagne; the pop of the cork; the webbing along smashed glass; lightning; heat; fire. The magic gently carves through possibilities’ path and reality’s rubber band snaps back. The tension is gone: a connection is made.

Heat shoots up my arm and I fling my hand forwards before I can think. The energy leaves as quick as it came, bursting from my fingertips as a firework, spiralling, splitting, sporadic. It collides with the ground 20 metres out in a burst of flame. The warmth reaches my bones soon after the flash, and the explosion readily fades to a smoulder. There’s room for improvement, but starting already feels an achievement.

author swap

Mail // 23.08

23 Aug 24
With the right postage you can put anything in the mail. Keep it rectangular to be polite or circular if not, and spread love with one short message at a time. It's thought-ful. It's practical. It's tangible. Stamps are gorgeous. Use postcards (or postcard-alikes) for extra punch to your missives. "I saw this and thought of you, and I wanted you to hear." Send it slowly and it will deliver much.

Love, alice, For Writchal 24

scream

04.09.24

I share a backyard with the folks upstairs. It’s a little number, maybe 6x6 metres. Half concrete, a little more than half weeds carpeting the concrete, with a couple of pots of bolted veggies spotting the edges to set the mood. I sit out every so often on our communal lawn chair, when the wind settles and the sun peeks over the fence. It’s a little depressing, I’ll admit that much. But it has its moments. My favourite thing of all, though, is to watch the robots play.

I’ve only been here a few months, so up until recently the only interactions I’ve had with our upstairs neighbours I’ve had so far have been the bump-ins taking the rubbish out or passing on letters underneath the door. I do know that they get plenty of heavy packages, which I’ve politely requested via sticky note they bring upstairs themselves. I assume they’re for some mechanics thing, though their projects turn out awfully small for all the effort. Goes a bit over my head, really. We’ve been getting to know each other the past couple weeks, sharing beers on the backyard steps now the weather’s started to warm up. Everybody up there has always got something new they’re working on, it must be some kind of hypehouse maker’s space deal. The invite’s extended at sunset, whenever someone finishes a new prototype.

The first time, we stewed in the smell of next-door-barbecue in early evening silhouettes. They’re awfully quiet for mechanics, which is something I appreciate. But when they come outside with their little robots, I can hear a little conversation being had before the test run. They squat down on the concrete and hold it gently in their hands. An announcement, an encouragement, a ward. I appreciate my presence doesn’t impede the ritual. They set their machines down, and whether autonomous or by remote, the lights flicker on.

As I learned, they never move quite right on their first go. It’s adorable, really – they’re like week-old lambs – with energy for a body not yet capable to contain it. Whether it’s the over-greased joints, a programming error, a too-tight screw, there’s always something. They spin and jump and flip and fall and move their joints in ways they were not meant to. The makers always mumble perplexed potentials to problems when something goes awry, but never come to frustration. Regardless whether it’s working, I can’t help but be impressed. If the second floor’s anything like the first, I can understand why they’d need the space out back, as small as it is. Eventually they robots get another test run, a few, sometimes maybe not, until they're properly calibrated. The energy is eventually contained, proper, working. Though in those first careful steps, as they were made to be, there’s still plenty joy.

elf bozo

perspective

underground

20.09.24

The lungs are raw, air as thrush against the ankle. A gentler pace. The light is harsh, vignetting in on all but the closest. Shrink me down. With care or none, details emerge with scale. The ridges of a coin are idol, eyes hypnotised wearily into center. Swiped over by the sun through the leaves through the window through the blinds, now, rest.

20.09.24 - everyday carry

I often wonder if I can make do with just the things in my bag. There’s a little test now and then in the form of an unplanned crash on a couch or a day extended beyond the expected. Packing for the day attracts less attention than a weekend, a week or few. Could I make do with just the clothes on my back? My belongings? Depends how long. Money, phone, charger, sugar, insulin, a blunt object, lighter, masks, paper, a grocery bag. Money is the important one. The distance between a charger or medicine supply sometimes has me feeling like a dog to a post. I’ve come to learn how long the leash is and wonder, too, if that length is conclusive. Moving house has, as it’s ought to do, brought to attention amount of material I’ve accumulated on this here planet. “Let it go.” It tugs at me every now and then, speaking in whispers. Could I go? Hop on the road for a while. You know, if I drove. A train, then. Light the wick on my savings. The things I need and the person I am are intertwined. And I do not [want to] need very much.

20.09.24 - sketching

I’m not in love with drawing as much as I used to be, but I’ve been enjoying the flirtatious little moments sketching in between things. A still-life of a window’s negative space made up of the commuter crowd. Getting silly trying to capture the splintered wood texture of a spatula at home. I used to think line art was a rule. A border to hold exactly where form starts and stops. A representation, of the truest form!!! I don’t think I was having much fun with prescription. Description - now that’s where it’s at, baby. An impression exaggerated, defined and morphed by: light, shape, feeling, weight. Every time of day holds a million shapes, and they deserve a little meditation. The moment is fleeting as the feeling, even if it has happened exactly like this before. How do the lines sit with you now? My dear gunzelling friends have given me a new perspective on the particulars of public infrastructure and the differences that make them. They are plenty and they are everywhere. Go draw some trains!!!!!

author swap week

25.09. sometimes this is how it ends

sometimes this is how it ends
follow the river past the bend
milkweed caterpillars continue the feast
and the sun will rise once more from the east
distant meteors hand in hand
fallen leaves feed the land
every year the creek gets drier
another storm an open fire
picking up the pieces again
sometimes this is how it ends

diy

silhouette

10.10.24 - heavenly bodies

I’ve always thought of clouds a representation of something, a marker for rain, a stone to dull the sun’s edge. Never… a “thing” in space. A sticker, ostensibly, one and the same as the backgrounds on the weather app. All until my cousin showed me those photos. She comes down from the mountains every other year – catching up over dinner – the photos: from the passenger seat, paddocks on the way into town. The clouds. Every so often, she says, they sink down to earth, like an alien ship: eerie, pulchritudinous, solid. She’s never lived here, so though presumptive in saying so, was correct in gathering you don’t get much of anything properly natural downtown. The buildings crowd the skyline with little recourse, and the parks are a flimsy pastiche. I realise I don’t get out of here enough.
Oh. The clouds. It’s funny, the photos looked shopped. The shadow sits so awkwardly and obviously beneath it in the frame.
She joked about the few pine trees below it, sunk into its form, that look like little legs. The low-frequency fear that struck through me in that moment has wormed its way into my head and has since made a home. When I look up now, to the stickers, I can only think of the utter scale of their potential limbs. Ambling as they draw along with the wind. There is no meter, no scale, that I hold the same as I do those angels above. It harrows me. I’ve begun to plan my weeks around the weather, the days around the breeze. There is a feeling that moves through me, as the shadow does passing over, that I am nothing but small.

15.10.24 - GISS (lol)

A bird is often seen as it is, contre-jour, underneath a blanket of clouds furnishing a sky’s worth of light. Anonymous in the shadow, if not for the rhythm holding their outline. Familiar suspects beat to their tune, idiosyncratic and alive. Welcome Swallows, in some ways the most quiet, in others are the loudest of the bunch. Popping up like dandelions in spring (and nearly as small), with a flutter that no other shares. Flap flap flap

starlight

24.10.24

Waking up here each morning feels like a dream. The wind rattles gently at the shelter, thick with pollen, slathering the day with a foggy haze. It whistles in moments, flowing with the hilltop’s contour. Below, floodplains sprawl outwards in a muddy contrast of land and water. Waves of grass blink slowly in hues of amber and lime, pushed gently by the current – of the breeze, of the water flowing unseen through the heath. Trees cluster further afield at riverbeds. They sway like kelp, with neither resistance nor structure. In the middle distance is my ship. Though sitting well, hushed as the rest of the landscape, it’s hard to ignore its pallid stature. Wracked, furrowed deep into the grass. The crash was long, ugly, breathless. Unkind to the earth. It’s only now that I can see the scar starting to heal. I feel my stomach turn.

I sit curled in front of my shelter, having taken the final serve of rations. I find myself lucky, amongst all things, to have crashed in this place. On a small stretch of land, just as likely as beneath water. I am reminded, in dreams, of speeding above the land in flight. Even with the mountains blurring in shape, for a few seconds, becoming dreadfully aware at the scale of the expanse. The map of this planet escapes me. I’ve pondered wandering on foot – to civilisation. The distance would be only a near impossible task if were not for the water. The river’s divide is braided, branching. The earth rises in islands eroding slowly to flowing sediment. The change itself is near imperceivable, though the trickle is constant. The waters are fertile. I see it host life in land and river and air, but all I feel is the mud eating slowly at my skin. For now I stay still, and I care to keep dry.

It’s become homely in that temporary way. I have taken my fair share of stays in hostels on long hauls cross-planet. Among all the comforts I’ve taken for granted, I think of another heartbeat. The engine is beyond repair, and I find myself unsure if it was provided without tampering. My exit was far from moral, anything but planned, and something near voluntary. Still as I am, lost as I am, there’s hope to be held in the ship’s emergency radio. The crash left everything up in flames, the whole of it’s useless, but the transceiver still lights up. I don’t know if it’s still putting out signal, and I don’t exactly know how to check. The nights are seldom cool enough to want for bedding, and for that matter, sleep. I lay restless as the ship’s light blinks against the rest of the sky. I’m not sure if I should be dead. If I am dead and I don’t know it yet. The radio flutters like the stars, reaching for something farther than it may ever see. I see the stars, and I feel the same.

author swap

real

02.11.24

You can’t avoid the growth! It jumps across the street, construction whizzing as tics in the grass. I think the city is eating itself; to become a city again. This is how it’s always been, I remember it much slower is all. Different, obviously. Every place touched cradles it gently in lots: changes, soon. Routes grow faster than they’re cut, every day brings another corner if you’re willing to look. I'm looking. It feels like there’s too much to find. Am I lost? It’s my problem and it isn't: I can't make myself wanted.

rend

11.11.24

Look, I know the worst of Summer is yet to come, but nothing makes me happier than these little whispers. Maybe it’s most of this nation’s housing not “having proper insulation installed” that makes Winter such a bitch to deal with, but leaving bed stings so much less at the moment. I love the evenings, whipping out to skate for golden hour because there’s nothing more you could possibly want. That sun, that air, sweet and mellow and thick with the smell of asphalt. The nights grow warmer and ever so alluring, my heart more full, and the skies clearer. It started with the warmth slowly pulling me outside, back inside, outside again. While her pull is ever-present, now I can feel my hands being placed on the wheel – depression and accompaniments slowly drying up in the sun, clarity has set in.

Getting out on the other side of another low (this too shall pass etc etc) has made it so much easier to name what I’ve been going through. Loneliness, depression, illness (and accompaniments) can make it hard to see much of anything. I’m lucky I’ve got a little break in the rain, and I’m starting see the value in myself regardless of if I’m not able to “be a person”. I can’t exist solely under ideal circumstance. I am, regardless if I don’t want to be. I’m a walking contradiction and so is everybody and it’s not that big a deal. I keep finding myself asking who I want to be, and what I want to look like. And I think the answer, right now, is in the sun.

part 1
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