Magenta Monster

Chaos (first published on Turquoise Monster)

A butterfly stirred within in my curious hand

Hesitant to take the offered nectar

Golden, amber, sweet

It’s tongue long and curled appeared

Lapping gently with distraction

I looked up at the sign

Butterflies for sale, $12

Wings translucent in half dream light

Shimmer, golden-blue

It walked on insect legs tickling my finger

The drone of its brethren could be heard

Pressing against crystal cages

Rainbows glittered fleetingly

Dust beaten to the ground – luxuriant in growth

An angry tide: waiting

‘I’ll take this one’ the teller nods

A golden leash of fine spun silk

I decline the offer and pay with jewels

Coloured rock ice – for a little chaos

Outside a red sky over silver sand

I look to Chaos and open my hand

Blue glittered fleetingly

Freedom I whispered

A breeze blew it away

Story Starters are a twitter meme were writers share opening lines they have created in order to help others begin their writing process – here are more of my story starters – take and use 🙂

1) The world was created in waves, each successive one wrapping the previous one in complexity

2) From Paradise to Utopia was a hard and perilous path

3) In the discord of all things a special harmony can be found

4) Dreams filtered through the maze of mind – the man sat and mused on the worlds they created

5) ‘If you think you are putting me in that machine you’ve got another thing coming!’

6) A light mist drifted, curling into shapes and twisting it changed into something

7) Sick; she was so very sick and not just her, everybody was sick, it was bitting into the very fabric of how the town was run

8) Ghosts were just your subconscious playing tricks, ghosts didn’t really exist

9) Dark elements were at work in Annika’s mind, there was a blankness to her eyes

10) Aracni sat at her loom

Melanie (first published on Red Monster)

It was the sound that pierced Melanie to the bone; that liquefied her brain and made red gloop run from her nose. She never knew that it was a new piece of military grade tech, nor that she was the first casualty of a global war.

But if she had she would have been happy – in the end the first to go were the lucky ones and the saviours?

Hell can take many forms.

I love writing challenges – it is kind of why I ended up with the monster blogs.

The first week of May is a picture book writing challenge – the idea is that you write the script of a picture book, one a day – in the first week of May 🙂

So that is what I shall be doing and you can follow the progress on Orange Monster!

Of course the first week of May is almost over!!! Call this procrastination 😉

Princess in a Bubble (First published on Red Monster)

Inside a sphere on the pedestal of King Annason a tiny but perfect woman sits upon a gloriously large amethyst, gem quality and cut to perfection. She is dressed in brocade and silk and has streaming ribbons in her wavy honey hair. She is a princess, sent to him for marriage but something about her had displeased him and so she had been imprisoned within the eggshell thick glass bubble.

Her hair and clothes move as if there is an air current, though in actuality there can be none. Sometimes she gets up and wanders around, forlorn inside her little world. She is hungry but cannot starve to death. There is no food but nor is there the same concept of temporality for her body, though her mind still knows it and longs for rest.

Very occasionally the King, who is old and wizened and vicious will come and demand a song of exquisite beauty from her. She sings sweetly and dreamily but it is never good enough and he never relents and so he always denies her her freedom.

He married again several times and each wife suffered some horrendous fate without issue. A coco coloured beauty from beyond the southern sea had offended him and so was turned into a wooden chair upon which he sits to address the kingdom’s nobles. Her features are locked within its highly polished grain and sometimes they change.

The blue glow from the candle arbour is another wife as is the very crown he wears but they are waiting, all of them. He is old and the enchantments are likely to break when he dies and they all wish to perish with him in order to be the ones to carry his soul over. They are in the half realm now, courtesy of the spells he wrote, and they know how to show him exactly how much they have suffered due to his selfish ways.

The end

There Was An Old Man… (First published on Red Monster)

There is an old man whose wife thinks him insane and paranoid. He is scared of video players and cannot grasp the concept of MP3s but what he most fears are coat hangers, especially the old metal kind that are actually useful to the arts and craft community – not to mention the budding engineer.

These, he insists, lurk for him in the most obscure of places – waiting for his unsuspecting form to open a cupboard or walk through the hallway to the stairs. Then they leap upon him, entangling and snaring him often ripping clothing and leaving bruises.

His wife thinks he’s paranoid but the truth is that the coat hangers are out to get him. They have been baying for his blood ever since he was eight years of age when he cut one of them up to act as supports for a model plane he had stuffed with homemade explosives. Coat hangers have very long memories.

Odd Socks (first published on Red Monster)

One day the purple socks with yellow polka dots were separated by a cruel twist of fate – namely the washing. Left was left upon its own and Right was abandoned in the student halls of residences washing room where it promptly fell down behind the dryer.

A similar fate had occurred to a green and pink striped pair. As a solution to the odd sock dilemma the student decided to mix and match and thus Left met Right and Right met left and they were happy, though they felt their relationship was a bit unbalanced and longed to be a four instead of a two. 

Fortunately for them the tumble dryer broke down and an engineer was called who pulled the machine out and rescued the lost socks. He was just draping them on the back of the ‘washing waiting to be done’ chairs when the student walked in.

Ecstatic to find her missing socks she thanked the engineer for them with a kiss and coffee and later the socks mingled in a draw just above the t-shirts.

Story starters are there for anyone to use – enjoy!

1) They did not approve, but how were they to stop the boy before he destroyed their family reputation?

2) Blasts of plasma exploded the rock next to him

3) The moment stretched out before them not infinite but enough to con the human mind

4) Clusters, everything always ended up clustered, even things that should have repelled seemed to group together

5) It was Valentines Day or that day

6) Juliet whispered in his ear – the ogre it seemed could be tamed

7) The grass here was glass, well a kind of ceramic really

8) Wall flowers vied for space to be sad and on their own

9) The cool breeze spoke of glaciers and blizzards of an extreme nature

10) It was just a bowl, nothing remarkable, it was not even made of anything interesting

The Music (First published on Turquoise Monster)

The still sad music of humanity
Pulsed in my ears, making them
Bleed with incencerity
I cried to the requriem
Of their freedom,
Dirged in drum beats
Of heart

The harmony of life
Split me asunder
And poured my entrials
On the ground
Taken as cat gut –
They were used…

To string the bow
That played
The music
Of Humanity

Metcalf stood back from the oily smoke. If he thought about the smell and what it was, he gagged; but he was the senior investigator in this mess and had to be made of sterner stuff. The plumes were from the incinerator designed to deal with foot and mouth outbreaks in farm animals, but the carcasses being loaded in where most definatly not animals. He chewed his cheek until it drew blood. Someone, he thought, someone high up had thought of these people as diseased animals. The feeling just would not leave him. It was supposed to have been an accident and he was to check and write a report to prevent it in future.

But of course it wouldn’t happen in the future becuase they were all gone, including the women from the shelter hiding from their men, their little ones following them to the same mass grave. Metcalf’s hands balled into fists. Such a waste – the teenagers from the mental health half-way house had mostly been affected too.

With a bad taste in his mouth he turned away from the piles of bodies awaiting incineration. The food in the soup kitchens was the only answer; his men were rounding up what was left of it. The lab would have results for him that afternoon. ‘Sir?’ came a tentative voice.

‘Rose?’ he said turning around. The young sargeant had been crying. Most unprofessional, but then so had he, hadn’t he?

‘Some of the food… some of the food, got into the childrens home.’ she was pale with bright spots on her cheeks. He didn’t correct the term childrens home, there was no point. He sighed heavily.

‘Has anyone survived yet?’ she shook her head. Metcalf closed his eyes and ran his fingers through his course silvered hair.

‘Sir… ?’ her voice broke. ‘It looks to me like… like radiation poisoning.’ She pushed the toe of her shoe into the ash covered ground. He nodded, that had been his conclussion too; but the only thing they all had in common was the donated food. Soup kitchens fed the homeless, shelters and children’s homes often ran on donations too, as did old folks homes!

‘Rose, check out all the old folks homes,’ she nodded, ‘and Rose send warnings to other districts would you?’ The puzzelment was there only for a moment replaced by fear – This could well be bigger than one city, why had it taken them so long to spot it?

Because, he thought bitterly, homeless people die in puddles of puke and blood all the time.

It had only become apparent when the rats had entered the city to clean up the corpses. He’d had to call in the Army to help clear the corpses, there were just so many of them. Rose’s slight shadow fell across his path once more, ‘Dad?’ she whispered, he didn’t reprimand her, ‘Dad the hospitals! It’s in the hospital food too,’ and then she was sobbing and he was hugging, her numb but pleased she at least could still feel.

He squeezed her shoulders, ‘we’ll get them, Rosey’. She nodded mutely.

She dried her eyes and drew back her shoulders in defiance. ‘If it’s radiation it will be easy to trace to source.’

He smiled with no humour. ‘They’ll have accounted for that honey, it will be dirty and mixed source; probably traceable to half a dozen enemies of state.’ he snorted. Yes, he was that suspicous.

He went back to his office to read the incoming reports. There were scared people, clustered around the front of the building, screaming plague, screaming doomsday, crying and wailing. Some of them, he noticed, had the sheen and the odd one here and there had a nose bleed. Some of these people were dying and there was nothing he could do to save them.

The common factor was the food, donated food to the needy, so it could be that cheap contaminated food was being sold on the black market somewhere and a benevolent donar had thought it would feed hungry bellies as well as anything else. If so, that person would probably have commited suicide. He knew those reports were yet to come, the nurses and aid workers who would think they’d done it, the officers who had to watch a childrens’ home die.

Eventually he got into his office, his gut churning on nothing but black tar coffee. This had to be deliberate, all the vunerable had been targeted. His heart sank as he read confirmation messages, every city and town, all of them – the same. It was a national operation.

And then he saw it, a red envolope. Gingerly, he opened it.

Metcalf, Welcome to the New Solution Now the world will be stronger Now we will have only the brightest, strongest Society has been cleansed

Do not fight you are part of it

The Actiman Affiliate

…..

It could be a hoax, people did things like that, and why sign it such if it really were the Actiman Affiliate, the global corporation? And why? Just why? But he was already punching the forensic team’s number and the internal post’s. This was genocide, this was a cull, why hadn’t he seen it? He’d thought it was an accident cover-up – but this was systematic. The sick, the old, the poor, all those who rely on society had been… exterminated.

A white-clad officer took the envelope from him. He called the government; the coldness in his stomach told him he would be fighting them on this one. His life expectancy was now probably very low. Time for Rose and her brother to leave the country – he’d sort out their visas before he trod on too many toes. Of course he thought bitterly if the Actimen Affiliate were involved then there would probably be entire nations writhing in slow languid death already, and if that was the case then nowhere would be safe.