Merc's Micros

And here are a bunch of 30-word micros from the November 2008 Your Messages challenge:

She preens and pimps, coddles and massages bodies and egos; she does sums in her head and wonders at the fuss about women who say they want it all.

When my feet grew too fast for my shoes, I ran barefoot. Later I danced in Blahniks, ignoring the blisters. Bunions split my slippers, but soon I won’t need them.

When the curly-haired ticket collector refused to take mine, I was devastated. Months of electric fingers now fizzled and deflated my dreams. Talk about rotten rejections! No don’t!

When the Japanese Consul turned a deaf ear and kept stamping their transit papers, thousands of lives were saved. Unsaved faces are forgotten and cherry blossoms now bloom in Vilnius.

Pikelets aren’t little pikes, crumpets aren’t a baker’s trump of crumbs and a goblet of tea has little to do with teetotalling goblins. But they all make a fine breakfast.

I lolled in my glass of champagne, puffing on my pink Sobranie. I’d forgotten a thing or two: where to flick the butt, and how to get to my negligee.

I pretended they were glass when I blew them, wanting them to last longer than a blop.
So I hung them on my unpierced earlobes and listened to them tinkle.

OK, he fell. Yeah, and he was raw, but you can’t blame the king’s horses for trampling him and for making a mess. Somebody pushed him. Didn’t you, Your Majesty?

He was a bit of a leech, you know. You had to unfasten each of his suction caps; but then the blood would flow. He had two hearts, it seems.

The soldiers killed all the dogs. They were scared the dogs would warn us they were coming. They were scared, my mother said, her mouth bloodied. They were so young.

The only silence in my house is that of the peeling paint, the straining pipes and the glowing rafters as the fires lick into the corners of my tiled life.

I believed my watch but it had stopped. I’m late for my thirties and I doubt if they’ll let me in. But I’ll sneak in and watch the pc tick.

When I told them I was leaving France they all wanted a spot in my suitcase. They came in wheelchairs and with crutches. Frog legs ain't no dish in Austria.

I have a champagne taste on a beer income but when I wear my necklace of bottle tops, pour ale into my slipper and close my eyes, I’m almost there.

When you cry you may not be noticed while in the act. It’s just afterwards that your puffy face and bleary eyes give you away – and the empty tissue box.

King Pipper covered his boobs with some macramé and with his alpenstock skewered the tenderloin, had a chomp at the flageolet and then washed down the poppadom with a demijohn.

I am learning to go with my gut when smelling roses, jasmine, BO, the odd whiff of rotten-egg gas; how easily odours can turn and undo what the eyes see.

Peanuts. I lift my face and get a big slurpy kiss. I swing up on his tusks and he tiptoes down the stairs, out the door and into the sun.

Transplanting is an art in some places; in others it’s a crime. Take Oz. You can’t even slip in on a banana skin so don’t think about catching a tumbleweed.

The bottle of silence was on special offer. She drank it all in one go, hoping it would be enough. It almost was, but it couldn’t drown out her hangover.

Some see you as a bloom of welcome. But I know you. You cling, you cloy, reminding me of years I left behind while racing sunsets to escape you, Frangipani.

My husband always says he’d have to kill me twice – once to get me six feet under and the second time to stop words from coming out of my mouth.

His getting pregnant and having a baby turned the world upside down. But his somersaulting began when he found his clitoris and saw that it bore the tiniest of penes.

My German-speaking parents spoke to me in English. My daughter’s mother tongue is French but I’m not. She speaks to her father in argot while I just reminisce in strine.

Endings are always tricky. Closed? Open? So are beginnings. Once upon a med res? And if eyes glaze over in between? Call the salvage police and duck. It’s a memoir?

- They’re just like big rabbits.
- It’ll bring down their carbon footprints.
- They’re high in protein.
- Low in cholesterol.

- No way am I going to eat Skippy!

The devil admired the way the pair of red stilettos disguised her. What if she were to keep just one and give the other to Versace, or was that Prada?

In 1955, Dame Edna of the lilac hair first waved her gladioli in the Land of Oz. Fifty-five years later the flowers had become extinct. You’d better believe it, Possums!

Underwater underwear is what they wear Down Under. Dangerous are just the sharks that care bubbles about the gender of the wearer and the ability thereof to hold his/her breath.

Stiletto condoms

A little kinky.
Me?
And you’re ruining everything.
I thought you liked it.
I do.
Who’s kinky now?
Just touch.

He took her hand and guided it over the parquet floor. “It cost me a fortune,” he said.
“Very nice.”
“But can you feel them?”
“Them?”
“The pock marks. Pock marks all over it.”
“Interesting.”
“You know how that happened?”
“How?”
He glanced sideways at her stilettos on the floor.
“But I thought you liked them.”
“I do.”
“And you always ask me to take off my clothes.”
“I do?”
She ran a hand over his clavicle. “You always say, take them off.”
“I do,” he said.

She’d come in the door and he’d tell her to take them off. She’d unbutton her blouse and slip out of her skirt and then, stark naked but for the stilettos, she’d come towards him and, and … well, who could say no? His parquet, though, was showing the strain.

The parquet is suffering.
The parquet?
Your stilettos.
She ran her fingers over the pock marks on the floor. “Is it a me or the parquet thing?”

She didn’t come for a whole week. He rang. “I’m busy,” she said.
“I miss you.”
“And the parquet?”
“I love you,” he said.
“In stilettos?”
“Yes.”
“And the parquet?”
“More pock marks, I guess.”

He opened the door. “Take them off,” he said. “Your clothes, I mean.”
Smiling, she placed two woolly thinglets into his hand and proceeded to undress.
He slipped one of the thinglets over a finger, the other over a thumb. Naked, she lifted one stiletto-clad foot. “Slip it on,” she said.
He smiled.
“Now the other.”
“I love you,” he said as his eyes ran approvingly over her body down to her felt-clad stiletto heels.
“Condoms,” she said. “For the parquet.”

Tock tocking

They made me take off my bra and the gold chain round my neck. It had been my grandfather’s and used to be linked to the fob attesting to the passing of time. He died before the war could get him. My grandmother died of cancer as did her son, my uncle. Dad hung in there until the pacemaker batteries died. Mum’s willing herself away.

As the tunnel closed over me and the tock tocking dulled my senses I figured I’d had a good run for my money. I’d seen the world, known love, never lost it, shared my life and my words. I was at peace with myself for those few minutes. I get the same feeling every time I take off in a plane. Then I forget.

But it’s different now. How much time is left to do all the things I must do? An essay to finish. What madness made me commit to such research? But commit is commit. All the sins know that. Do I need to revise them? Leave them part of the story. A novel. Almost there. At least I’ll be saved the rejections. Maybe I’ll have time to be there for Mum. And to see our daughter’s graduation. But there are so many papers to go through, mess to clean up, arrangements to make. And there’s the dog.

I’ve put the gold chain back on. It just links to itself. No interfering fob anymore. Time is today. Every moment. Move on. Regrets? Not really. In fact, none at all. Not even the smoking, but I’m glad our daughter doesn’t. Maybe I put her off. Maybe I saved her life, for a while at least. The chain gleams in my fingers in the way of old gold. Tonight, I’ll be getting back the results.

Christmas goose

Christmas and fat geese. Fat. Goose. What a goose I was to think that Christmas would fix everything. Time of cheer. Family. Peace. Home. I was out of it. On the other side of the world in the middle of an argument with the love of my life. Skype kept cutting off. Email. He doesn’t answer emails, just reads them. I could hardly post Luv U on my blog and sms was out of the question for the love of my life had three thumbs. There was more of me, too.

Weeks passed and I pined. I had to see him. Bring him a gift. Both meant money I didn’t have. Passion makes possible, I chanted. I ate only salads, drank only water, walked and jogged everywhere I went. Sometimes I was even faster than the bus, but only when it was going the other way. In the Op Shop I bought five metres of red ribbon and asked the butcher for ten sheets of wrapping paper, promising to pick the turkey up later. My old car was getting lonely, I know, as I wasn’t driving it any more. Bye, Morris, I said. I have to sell you.

I bought a cheap ticket via Beijing and Virgin and landed shivering in the snow. With my paper and ribbon under my arm, I hitched a ride to town. Then I wrapped myself up in the paper and rolled about in the metres of ribbon. I tied a bow around my middle and another around my forehead. People were hurrying home. The smell of mulled wine was in the air. Candles glowed from behind windows. I rang his bell. The door opened. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

He pulled me inside, kissing me around the bows. “I knew it was you,” he said.

The Memory Box

Jewellery can be just a work of art. Did I say just? No. If it’s design, it needs to have some practical purpose. But your practicality, she thought is perhaps my serendipity. That had always been the way with him and he never gave up. But all that was now in the past, and she was firmly in the present with a project to complete.

It’s not just rings on your fingers and bells round your neck, she thought as she took two pieces of aluminium. She cut and filed tiny leaf holes all over them until her fingers and thumbs were coated in silvery dust; here and there thin scratches stopped just short of blood. She shaped the two pieces into the form of praying hands: not ones that were pressed together, those that let life still breathe in.

The silvery grey of the metal was cold, so she enamelled the pieces in ruby red. She dried them on their backs like open palms, and then on their fronts, humped like twin turtles.

She took his love letter and ripped it into scraps. The tears lacerated the words “I”, “love” and “you”. There were so many of them. She piled them into one of the halves and quickly trapped them with the other. With a thin white silk ribbon she laced the two humps of her life together. She wanted to tie a long flowing bow, but the ribbon was too short. There was only enough for a tight little knot.

The humps now resembled a heart: not the Valentine sort, the one shaped like a fist. She cupped it in both hands and shook it about. The love scraps danced and whichever way she stopped the three little words peeked out at her from within her memory box.

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Inspired by Maarit's memory box

Uncle Henri

Everyone in the village was talking about the man who´d asked the little girl to accompany him to the park. Then someone overheard Henri say: “Come with me.” And they´d seen the little girl hesitate and then put her hand in his. They´d watched him go down the street and round the corner and when he was out of sight, they still saw him, hand in hand with the little blonde girl. They saw him lead her over behind the garden house in the far corner of the park and they saw him bend down, stroke her hair, unbutton her coat, untie her shoelaces. And it all became too much. So they called the police.

Henri yelled and the little girl screamed. Someone took her aside as they dragged him away. That was the last she saw of him. When he got out a few months later, he shot himself.

The little girl is grown up now. She sits and stares at old photos of her uncle Henri. She still blames herself for that day in the park. That blame has followed all her growing up. She couldn´t understand then, not even now, what all the fuss was about. Shortly after they took Henri away, she´d noticed how her godfather, even her own father, wouldn´t pick her up or hug her when other people were around. It was as if that sort of thing was suddenly forbidden, forever. She wanted hugs from those she loved, wanted the world to see.

Today she finds it hard to make contact. She fears that once she makes it, they’ll take it away, like they took away her uncle Henri. They´d skirted the garden house, he´d pushed her so high on her favourite swing. It had been the last happy day of her life.

Knives in their lives

The message went out. Reunion! Knives in their lives. Come one and all. So they came from all times and places, some flying through the air and landing pointedly in the trunk of the oak tree, others clattering through the door, others still, just plopping into the grass.

First one to speak was the penknife her father gave her when she flew up from Brownies. “She whittled boughs with me to make arrows to protect her from the brown snake. She flicked me shut and hung me on her Guide belt.”
“What about me?” said the flick-knife. “I´m longer than thumb to little finger. My point can find your heart. He got caught at the border and said he just had me for protection, used me to clean his nails, peel the skin from potatoes. They didn’t buy it. Confiscated me, let him go, though.”
“He was in love,” said the Solingen bread knife. “And I was a gift. But I slipped and cut into her finger. Three stitches. She´s ignored me ever since. He sometimes winks.”
“We just try and hang in there,” said the three plastic knives in chorus. “Keep a low profile. She forgets we´re fragile.”
“Fragile/smajile,” said the cheese knife with the Emmentaler holes in its stainless-steel blade. “Now it´s a matter of design, darling.”
Victorinox concurred, blowing on his toothpick attachment. “But they don’t take us along anymore.”
“We tried,” said the hot-pink Swiss army knife. “But perhaps it’s better like that. Have you seen the riff-raff at the airport? In those plastic boxes? Exposed for all to see?”
“They could put us in their checked baggage,” said the Finnish hunting knife sulkily from inside its sheath.
“Er-hem,” said the oil stone. “You´re all much better off at home with me. Let’s sharpen up now.”