You know when you know you’ve got
to do something but don’t do it immediately, because you’ve got ages before it
needs to get done? While this is often my ironing pile (!), today it was a
small, short competition entry; one that I’ve known about for a few months, brainstormed
(to ensure I don’t pick the obvious angle), planned and even First
Drafted...and yet forgot all about the closing date!
Imagine my horror at my
disorganisation this morning when I realised the deadline is in 2 DAYS! Oops. Imagine
my relief, though, that I’m on a day off and had time to scrabble together a
couple of rewrites and then the Final Draft...and that I’ve caught the last
post of the day. Phew!
Who knows if it’ll make the
judges desk in time?!
If it doesn’t, it’ll teach me not
to leave things to the last minute (though you would’ve thought I’d have
learned from all those school homeworks and uni essays...!)
But if it does, I might very well
be in with a chance to win a book called ‘The Writer’s Treasury of Ideas’ by
Linda Lewis. It’s a 365-day collection of writing prompts, triggers and nudges
that might spark off a piece, or even simply act as a warm-up to the day’s main
writing. I’ve always fancied books like this and made a few mistakes in buying
ones that don’t quite match my expectations – but, hey, life is a gamble,
right? And if I can win a copy, that’ll keep my bank manager happy...!
So, the competition was to write
a 250-word fictional passage in which “a bottle perfume [one of the prompts
from the book] plays a major part” – and, as I’ve been Blog-Absent* for
absolutely
ages, I thought I’d share
my entry here with you:
The bottles line up on the
shelf like optics behind a bar. It was her addiction, collecting these scents;
her alcoholism. Each morning she’d take a nip, spritzing her body, selecting
which aspiration to buy into that day. It no longer exists, not for her.
Now it is my turn. I’d yearned
for this once; coveted the delicate crystal unicorn, the elegant ballet
slipper, the iconic square bottle with the interlinked double C. Never mind the
perfume inside, never mind the allure it promised. For me, it was always about
the shape, the artistry of the glass itself; pushed and pulled in its making to
the brink of collapse yet still surviving.
I look again and see used-up
femme fatales; spies with no intrigues left to report on. Some have scent left,
so old it has become jaundiced; jaded. Others are empty, the life sprayed out
of them. I remember the power they had, the gulp of her taste as she passed an
unwelcome intimacy. They are mine now – and I no longer want them. The
glass that sparkled with her reflection seems stained; surrendered.
Unlike her, I can make my own
Twelve Steps. One by one, I take the bottles down and pour their perfume down
the sink. I consider sensibly putting them in the recycling bin, but it is not
enough of a spectacle, a ceremony.
Instead, I smash each exquisite
bottle and cherish the delicious crunch of glass which punctuates the “goodbye”
I never got to say.
Hope you liked it – self-centredly, I’m pretty
pleased with it! Let’s wish it good luck for the comp.
*Apologies – it isn’t that I’ve
been neglectful because I have thought about my Blog and its purposes a lot,
and made attempts at posts that haven’t worked. My absence has been because I’ve
been working on and crafting the background ideas to Novel Number Two – and this
has taken priority. I hope to share some of this with you as time goes on, but
I need to
do it first to know what’s worth keeping and showing, and what’s just
for the wastepaper basket!
Ta ta for now!
