Choose Your Online Adventures Book Launch!

For all you collaborative writers, see what can be achieved together: Become a fan for #CYOA on FB http://www.facebook.com/ChooseYourOnlineAdventures  esp for #dustanddeath

See a trailer for the story here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=261559453858663&view=wall&notif_t=event_wall

And here is the first chapter ( the premise) for free - http://tinyurl.com/CYOAdustfree

A Date with Cinders (An Elizabethan Style Sonnet)

Get in my car with me, I’ll take you out.

We’ll have a super time till midnight’s chime,

when you should go, you mustn’t hang about.

When you’re half naked there lies six months grime.

We’ll leave the dance and get you back home quick;

I wouldn’t want step-mum to catch us here.

You know the sight of me will make her sick

Now that the prince’s wedding’s gettin’ near.

Oh Cinders, curse that stupid little fairy

who waved her wand to get you to the ball.

She got you hitched up with that lisping Mary;

A prince or not, he’s got no brains at all.

I’m sorry love to make you feel so bad,

My first love lost, I’ll always be this sad.

© Justyn W H Rowe 1999

Hope's Passing

Here where the scent of heather blows fine cascades of kisses to meet the fresh dew, I search for you though you cannot be found.

My heart is standing basalt, aching with the thaw of winter’s end.  The pale wanning of solstice echoes in a spasm within this numb frame.

You are gone my love, where no pike or javelin may graze such fairness of head or keenness of limb.  The poem of your breath is fading, spent in its power to call the vessel of my weary mind to harbour.

A kiss for you.  Another.  Brush of lip caresses an eyelid, invoking a smile but alas, the wind is my only lover.

Arms that held sinew and flesh now hang free in weave once distilled of its mire by your hands.  Oh, for the divine slavery of our union to once more bless these rags with your toil.

This day I stood, awash with the noise and spray of the whale roads before me, to search the edge of the word for a sign of your sail.  It was not revealed.

The stone is bare and smooth, there where the ancient pull of earth and these feeble soles have joined in devotion so often.

©Justyn Rowe.  June 13,1999

Hope's Journey

Great wealth for dowry 

beyond the brine sea

My kin will sing

honours for my love

Bright our ship sail

wind song for wine

New land for planting

sacred grove and hall.

Our battles all fought

with fury unbridled

In unearthly waves high,

we yearn for home

Here lies our boat

beyond the brine sea

Oaken belly broke,

burned to blood by sky.

Eyes hoping outward,

throats bare with salt tears

Our rage is spent, lost

in oceans of sorrow.

Brother and sword kin

brine fit for reward

O for timber and branch

for rafting together,

Would see us homeward

to fair Erinn’s fields

I dream of your hair,

soft fern and waterfall

Rushes and ripe fruit

from deep thorn thicket 

You’re not the sun

though land darkens without you

No moon gave you birth,

yet you warm the night

You’re not of the stars,

still you steer this heart

Great wealth for dowery 

my heart bid me bring you

You are my path light

from ocean to home.

©Justyn Rowe.  June 11,1999

Climbing

Gripping violent slipping,

Bleak skin tweaked with fear;

Toes in flows of air grow colder,

Pleading head turned, 

Need to be freed from choice, 

Hanging suspended, play amended, spent

Rescuing mum, excited hum thrum won.

Sammy slips down through the climbing frame

At Eastern Beach.

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #178 for Oct 22nd, 2010

Awakening
How long had it been? It had to be 200, 300 years at least since the last official kill. “What the hell did they think they were playing at?” Jonathan mused As he deleted the encrypted order from his communicator and asked the car to close and merge with the general traffic. He almost couldn’t believe  the two short words that gave new  purpose to his existence.

It was a simple yet satisfying thing to merge with a population, after all, he was still classed as human on most of the worlds he commonly visited. All he had to do was maintain the behaviour expected of someone of the relevant class and profession; order the right things via his link, go to the right places at normal times, and generally conform to the multiplicity of local customs and bylaws governing the precinct in which he was ‘living’. Easy. The real challenge lies in disappearing at the right time, because with every part of your life under CC TV and recorded on the public record it took a great deal of forethought to subvert the system in such a way as to be undetectable or at the very least unremarkable.

It was not only that the authorities would be alerted by any subtle change in behaviour, because the human condition dictates that there will be aberrations and exploration no matter how strict code imposed upon it. Instead it had become a game in order to extract yourself from the mundane day to day existence without being noticed, and to resume the routine in such a way as to avoid the attention of the police.

On this occasion Jonathan chose executive clause # 325 whereby a citizen is allowed 7 minutes of unmonitored space for the purpose of toilet in any 12 hour period. Yes, I know, seven minutes is an unusual designation. The precise time was decided by a panel of 22 experts, and took an incredible 32 months of deliberation. Though rumour has it that in the end they just drew straws, but either way that is a bloody long time to decide how long it takes a man to take a crap!

On this occasion, seven minutes is all that was required to bring everything back online, dust himself off and get to work. They wouldn’t even miss him.

That is why they call him “the Hunter”. In the 32 centuries since he attained sentience there had never been a time where his abilities fell short. Unquestionably Jonathan was the master of his art. He would only receive a call when the keepers had no other alternative and all conventional means of resolution had failed. This in itself was most remarkable because the keepers were to most, god-like in their ability to manipulate time and space to maintain order, regardless of individual cost or localised concerns. Then they had been silent for such a long time. But enough about Jonathan. He would not appreciate this very personal scrutiny, and would certainly not condone any aggrandising of his abilities.

 Jonathan stepped out of the elevator into the seething mass of foot traffic flowing through the central business district. With cool precision he began matching data files in alphabetical order, cross-referencing faces and names. Bodies began to fall 30 seconds in his wake, their faces going blank after the silibent whisper of his concealed air pistol ended their existence with its fast acting neurotoxin. They never knew what hit them.

Deep in the Central Museum on sub level IV,  the school excursion continued.  12-year-olds William and Timothy  tossed the ancient mobile phone back in its display case. Some of these old devices were amazing yet baffling - the packaging said it was called an “iPhone” and the application was named “Assassin”. The boys could make no sense of the instructions and with a giggle  Timothy flippantly keyed-in the title of the obscure action film they had just watched in another area of the exhibit. “Kill Bill”. Their unqualified assessment of the device? “Harmless.”

This week’s prompt: Include this theme in your story… After a long night, a hunter sees something he/she cannot believe.

For more fiction Friday challenges go to http://writeanything.wordpress.com/fiction-friday/.

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #176 for Oct 8th, 2010

Your Main Character is a time traveller. He/She arrives at a destination but not all is as expected….

“Inside out” is my first impression. If there is an up, it’s upside down. Somewhere behind me there is a rhythm. It’s a sort of tapping sound a bit like footsteps, but I can’t be sure because my ears are inside out as well. I would be surprised, but surprise isn’t strong enough to capture what I’m feeling. Raindrops. That’s what that sound is. Really big raindrops falling on the surface of the water, and I’m under there somewhere. I can’t see anything, but I feel pink. Really pink, like when you shine a torch through your fingers and see the bones inside. My heart is beating somewhere in here with me. Beating is too strong a word though because it’s more like a squelch that makes each part of me quiver every second or so.

It isn’t all bad. I’m moving now, and I can actually feel things going past my skin. It’s nice that they don’t hurt when they bump into me, being inside out and all. I’d like to scratch that bit at the nape of my neck. I really would. No, I really need to because it’s driving me spare. Oh god, my arms! They’re gone; and my legs! I’m like an unrecognisable piece of road kill sealed in cling wrap.

Bloody Museum. They told me the HG Wells Time machine wasn’t just a replica. Since when has their information actually been correct? When I read the book, I’m sure he push the lever downwards to go forward in time. Didn’t he?

I think I went backwards. A long way backwards. Its going to be a wait. A long wait for evolution to put me back on track.  A long way back to vertebrate for this little amoeba.
To view the other responses to this prompt go to: http://writeanything.wordpress.com/fiction-friday/

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #175 for Oct 1st, 2010

Shad looks with longing out over the bay. The soft green of the Pacific, with its gentle white meringue wave tops blown along by the barmy South Sea Island breeze sparkling beautifully below a storybook blue sky. On the air, hints of seaweed, shell-grit, brine and coconut. Such a rich agglomeration of tastes and he wishes for the time to sample them all. Limping his way down the worn path from the high promontory there is no way to ignore the subtle fragrance of gardinia taitensis or the heady aroma of durian ripening on the ridges, and he stops many times, savouring the completeness of the experience. “The boss would love this” he thought, and setting out again carefully favouring the bruised ribs showing through his left side, he continues downward toward the lagoon.

Panting with the effort, he finally comes to rest just below the series of ageing mounds that represent his former crew. Over some the earth has settled almost level with the ground while the most recent, that of First Mate 'Dusty' Jones is so fresh it does not entirely contain the putrescence within. The taint of scurvy and gangrene unmistakable. Dusty had been a good mate and many times they had walked together contemplating the sea and all that surrounded her. His favourite stick now broken and made into a cross that stands at his head. How quickly turns the world.

Turning inland Shad makes his way to the tiny spring bounded by strelitzia that had so amazed and delighted the boss when they had first swum ashore. Several times a day each one would make their needy way to the brackish little pond, thankful that at least this one essential element had been easy to find.

There would be no rain tonight. There are none of the tells in the air today and it will be a long time before the monsoon comes again. Just as well, because he has decided that rain washes the fun from everything. When everything is clean you don't know you're alive. You may as well be made of stone, sitting there with no purpose instead of being out there in a fit of life brushing against it, touching and smelling, literally rolling in life. Like down on the beach when you dig and find that every moment holds some small creature or the remnant of one. Myriads of little lives spending themselves to make this paradise one shell at a time. 

With that thought Shad begins to use what energy remains to reach the spit where the boss lays still and bloated in the sun. Not far to go, only a few steps that cost a hundred miles. He wills his atrophied limbs to move until finally, with his last breaths labouring their way from punished lungs, his tongue dry again in its insatiable way, he crawls on his belly the last inches to his still captain's side.

Shadow licks his masters dry, swollen cheek and, resting his chin on his paws the breath goes out of him and he is gone. High above, the lonely cry of a seagull hails a small sail on the horizon.

Today's prompt “Lonely in Paradise”

Read more [Fiction] Friday stories at :http://writeanything.wordpress.com/

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #174 for Sept 24th, 2010

The Prompt this week was:

Use this lyric from Shore Leave to flavour your story: "Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban Heels" ~ You don't need to know or even hear the song - just use that lyrical imagery.  

http://writeanything.wordpress.com/fiction-friday/

Henrietta took a very long pull at the 'old fashioned' she had specially made in a highball glass. She blew the smoke from the pistol tip with relish.

The glisten on her painted lips gradually faded to be replaced by a trembling half smirk of irony. Tasting the remnant tang of gun smoke imprinting itself on her memory, she began a languid descent of the grand stairway feeling a great consanguinity with Mae West. Except there was no longer a man coming up the stair to see her anytime soon.

“I'll have to get the carpet cleaned” she observed, stepping across the blood soiling the last three treads. Stepping over the crumpled figure of a man, she let the revolver fall from her fingers and drop bomb–like onto his right cheek. Without looking back, Henrietta walked out the front door, slid into the driver's seat of the '56 Lincoln convertible, and drove away.

***

Lewis sat up slowly feeling like he'd been hit by a bus. He's right eye wouldn't open and feeling around he realised it was caked with dried blood. Exploring further, he was amazed to find that a graze across this temple and bruising around his chest and collarbone the only damage. He tore his shirt open and released the fastening of his bullet-proof vest, amazed again at what a lousy shot she was. Luckily.

It was raining again. He hoped the convertible had filled with water. She would have no idea how to raise the top, the dizzy bitch. A pity though, it had taken months of work to restore that white leather interior panel by a panel. By now she would be halfway to Atlanta if she had any sense, though somehow he knew she would have had to stop to buy clothes, or a hat and gloves. The lure of all that cash would be too much for her and he was certain she would be caught in no time.

Stepping to the veranda Lewis looked at the long wooded driveway, imagining himself trudging through the wet afternoon. He'd be lucky to reach town by dark and he began to wish he had worn better shoes; this pair he picked up in South America were strictly for show and will be lucky to last 20 minutes soaked in the roadside slush. At least he was finally rid of her. She who had stalked him across four continents claiming to have borne his child in an attempt to weasel her way into half his old family estate.

Lewis bent carefully, feeling every battered muscle, and gathered up his Chief Petty officers cap from where it had landed on the mouldy stoop. He never seemed to escape the rain, everywhere he went it was wet. On his last tour, bearing down through the South China Sea he had thought to retire to his old place in the South, imagining the warm sunny days of his youth. But the reality of this deserted old plantation was a far cry from those halcyon days. The bubble was burst and the dream over. Some shore leave this turned out to be!

With a sigh he stepped off onto the wet moss pocked gravel, too heart-sore to care about the rain as his mind swung to plan B. “I should've stayed in Hong Kong” he mused, his feet falling into steady rhythm, the shush of gravel in time with the aching pulse in his head forming their own blues riff. In his thoughts he was already back in the grey streets of the old city, the irony not lost on him as he found himself in a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels.

[Fiction] Friday Challenge #173 for Sept 17th, 2010

Prompt: Why did the Tooth Fairy fail to deliver coins one evening?

http://writeanything.wordpress.com/fiction-friday/ (follow the link to [Fiction] Friday's other responses! 


With a splintering crash the Tactical Response Group brought the operation to a close. Through the haze left by smoke grenades, James could barely recognise the interior of his newspaper's press room. Embedded with the local TRG he never thought his reporting would take him back to his own office or that he would face the possibility that anyone he knew could be embroiled in such an incredible tale of organised crime. In fact when he first took the assignment, he thought it would be a bit of excitement to keep him from a boring week of reporting banal suburban life and trivial small-town gossip.

Ainslie Buxton, chief editor of the Oldstown Herald was the quintessential newspaperman with half spectacles teetering precariously from the tip of his crooked nose and the piled up ash tray by his elbow bearing the weeks old butts looking for all the world like a small pyramid of animal droppings. The musty aroma surrounding Buxton also left much to be desired and any way you looked at him he was not in the running to win a popularity contest. He did however have one redeeming feature; the uncanny ability to spot a good story and sniff out the possibility of a scandal from 100 miles. As editors go he was decidedly old school and though the reporting team were terrorised by his constant screech for copy and his obsession with deadlines, there remained the grudging respect given a senior journalist who could wring a headline from thin air if necessary.

At precisely 5 AM every morning Buxton pushed his chair away from his desk, stubbed out his last cigarette of the night and donned his rumpled old hat, before heading out to the stairwell and making his way to the basement where he kept a private corner amid the floor-to-ceiling stacks of archived files. A leather chair, a cigar box and a small beer fridge had been fitted in around the assorted detritus of 110 years of newspaper production looking for all the world like they were growing there. 


On Friday the 17^th however, he didn’t slump into his seat or prepare and light a cigar, or open a Guinness stubby from the fridge as was his custom. Upon entering the basement, instead he turned left and exited through a fire door into the narrow alley filled with the smells of inner-city garbage collection.

James came to the corner of the building and did his best to become an imprint in two dimensions against the rough stone alcove where he waited, etched into the shadow like a duotone graffiti print; just as cold and just as still. Then a movement at the far end of the alley, where the disused backdoor of The Herald discharged a weary, disheveled figure looking very much at home among the discarded rubbish and empty boxes.  James was jogged from his revere by the sound of a BMW that  coming to land like a Learjet, blocking even more of the light from the cross street to his right. Four Jag-clad thugs disembarked and made their way down the alley in the jingle of gold chains and glinting Rolex.

To James' surprise the four paid deference to the rumpled figure, then passed over a slender black briefcase which the surprise Don opened quickly and, glancing at the contents closed again with a snap. Peering through the muted halftones of the streetscape, James struggled to recognise the old man. Even when he disappeared back into the building he could not make the leap to consider it to be other than a strange intruder. It was when slipping back toward the side street that the resemblance struck him with a blow more devastating than if he had actually suffered violence. Mr Buxton.

Surely not, he thought. Then the pieces fell into place. It had shocked him when the sting's location was disclosed. The authorities had revealed little, despite his probing questions. He was mystified by the task-force code name “tooth fairy” - their droll name for the gangland figure who was rumoured to be ordinary by day and a ruthless autarch by night. If this were true, James wondered where the devil he found the time? Of course, he did have a small army of reporters to send off on information gathering expeditions, and he had great contacts inside the local police. In fact, all things considered, it was the perfect position of power. With a jot of his pen he could end a career, choose what was published, and what the population knew. He could rule the history of the town by wit and publicity. But not today. James broke into a run as the black SWAT van arrived and he followed the helmeted and kevlar swathed cops into the stair well, then onto the second floor. The door was locked from inside. A battering ram came forward. Two sharp pops of grenade launcher and then with masks down and automatic weapons leading, the squad stormed in.

On the floor, like the spill from a charity bin, lay Ainslie Buxton, AKA The Tooth Fairy and former chief editor of the Oldstown Herald. A fortune in gold coins, recently stolen from the museum, spilling across the floor from the briefcase in a luminous cascade.