Prompt: 'This is what's under my bed'

(Not for grown-ups, just sillyness on a tired evening.)



I have night-time glasses. There is a pair that I wear in the day, but at night, I take those ones off and put them down carefully by my bed. Then I close my eyes tightly and pull the bed covers up over my head. I have to feel around in the darkness, but I always find my night-time glasses somewhere beneath the quilt. They are bendy, so I don't have to be careful with them. My night-time glasses always match my pyjamas and they are made of a very light material that is soft on my skin.
Once I have found my night-time glasses and put them onto my face, I can open my eyes. The space under the quilt isn't dark with my glasses on. There is light coming through the cracks around a door that opens into my matress.
I never knock on the door, but I open it slowly, because it leads to the world under my bed, and I never know what will be in there.
Sometimes my sister is there, but she goes to bed before me, and she is always a long way into the world under the bed by the time I arrive. She holds hands with an octopus and licks an ice-lolly even in the middle of Winter.
Sometimes the door in my bed opens onto the middle of a forest, and I can only explore around the nearest trees because otherwise I would get lost.
It's never night-time underneath my bed, so all the people there look tired all the time. Sometimes they are too tired to play games and we curl up in a big ball of people on the grass and get warm in the sun. But often, it's snowing, and they will play on sledges and make snowmen and throw snowballs with me.
The people under the bed love practical jokes most of all. Every chair in the world under the bed has a whoopee cushion on it, and there is plastic dog-poo hidden in all of the food. People are always offering me sweets there, but I can never take them because they turn my mouth bright blue. All of the ink disappears there, so I can never write anything down. All of the toilet bowls are covered in cling film, and all of the fruit is made of wax.
The world under my bed is full of tricks and games. I come home tired in the morning and spend all day thinking of new jokes to play on the people there........................

(I will try harder this year)

This is the prompt: "Write about eating with your hands"

We walked up the mountain. It was fun most of the way to the top, then we hit the white peak of snow and hidden ice. Even our thick-soled boots slipped. At first we were able to make jokes of it, but after a few minutes we could manage nothing more than to keep our legs beneath us. The snow had melted and refrozen into slick rivers that we worked our way over by clinging to sharp protruding rocks and each others' red, numb fingers.
The sun was still high in the blue sky and we could feel the sun in the air, but even that was somehow chilled and painful to our wind-chapped cheeks.
At the top there was a little turret of soldered girders with a plaque beneath it. We didnt read the sign, but used its low wall as a break from the wind. We sat and shivered in clothes soaked with cooling sweat, we wished for thermoses and hip-flasks, but only had icy bottled water to pass from hand to hand.
Out of your bag you pulled small parcels of brown waxed paper which we struggled to unwrap. Inside were sandwiches - your surprise, overshadowed by the difficult climb. I bit into the cheap, white, supermarket bread and felt the sweetness of the jam inside cut through my teeth.
I couldn't feel my fingers, but I could hold my sandwich well enough in their loose grip. You offered an apple to me and a weak smile to go with it. I shook my head at the thought of cold sticky juice trickling down my chin and licking ice across my face.
We took our time gathering our things back up once we were done - we were always careful to leave places as we had found them, I had even seen you once take away the litter left by other people at a pretty spot we had visited that Summer.
Then we headed back down the mountain, making careful links with our arms when our cold hands could find no place to cling to.
At the bottom, you kissed me unexpectedly. I tasted the sugary fruit of the jam sandwiches freshly on your tongue.
We returned to the car and sat inside it for a few minutes with the engine on so that your hands could warm a little before you drove us home.

He shushed me, waving my mouth shut while he crossed the kitchen and moved me aside to reach for a can, so of course i slammed my cup down and when i heard it crack, that little china chip dinting the sideboard, i said loudly over it, "it doesn't fucking MATTER" mostly to keep the echo from resounding and seeing his pitying eyes when he passed by once again. And there's a fury which is only about the present tense because sometimes you don't want to SEE the exact playout - watch him peel his dirty socks off stuck with grit and grime so i can feel the heat and moisture of his warm yellow feet from three feet away. I touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue and say, in my head, John, if i don't know what i want, it doesn't mean i don't want it.

He watches football, twenty minutes, a big grin on his face, the murmered cheering and thucking boot of the ball soaring through our little living room against the clink of my teaspoon stirring coffee. I think: mechanical invisibility. When we were younger we'd go out dancing, which is to say we'd get all heeled up and end up on our knees in the kitchen at 10 o clock, crooning alice cooper and clinging to each other, drunk on cheap red wine that tasted coarse and of cork, vinegary spices and hot breath, smeared lipstick and stale churches. We'd change tack just like that so I do it with a shrug. I tap the spoon on the rim, hum some bars and then break out a high pitch in a faint whisper; ain't that juuurrst like a woman. He places a palm on my thigh, a firm request with a murmured smile, vacant and sticky and pretty. You want some ice cream i ask. And he says yes please.

Roads

I come here just for the roads. those endless streaks like beestung blurs of light.
When i'm having a bitch of a night, wideawake, and my fists in fits under the sheets of GOD LET ME SLEEP, i go to have my heart gobbled up.
The journey.
Usually ten minutes of soft ocean blow in my head, eyes ache and a gallon of cold water. But when i park up, switch the ignition off and head down to Movert Bridge, i'm a travelling ghost of winters good salesman. Let me sing through the motherfucking night!!

Her coffee has nothing on the quiet. Its cut like glass, clean and precise, with the circular spark of a figure eight. but it is BLOWN OPEN. it is as wide as the world.

So to God i go and God i come back, six or seven miles watching cars approach and recede, a steady hum in a dancing collage of grey. the road is alight with the chalk-white glow of night. all the fissures and the atoms bump and breathe in the air and then i sneak back -

The bed creaks when i get up. and when she stirs - six am punctured with the warm smell of her cotton close weight - i grind her coffee beans and i wait.

Blow out the candle

The smell of paper still does it. Hot breath and a careful hand, some blue ink, even adidas when theyre touched with mud and creased up from wear. I cannot still like I'm 27, because the warmth rises in my brain and i can't help but remember those afternoons like a photoshot of memory; school-thru-university and a pick of maybe three or four images i hold to the light in the flickering daytime. I see his crystal squints as he glanced over with teasing tongue, writing any number of nothings while i waved them away, tapping my pen on my ankles or chewing at its end. The top line of those pages in my bound A5s circle my brain; that header space which he shaped into ours with his crackpot blowouts and ginsbergian references. 'What are you writing' i never asked, since it was every-other time and seemed clockwork and random. So he never voiced tumbling please breaths of 'love notes for you' to make me knock out my suspicion and see through to this: the string&clips of phrases which spelled a literary heart too stubborn to break.

This is where I want to go

She didn’t mean it so I told her don’t worry and she sucked at her teeth and exhaled. There was a tiny step in her breathing, a hiccup in that whole outwards breath and she drew her hands up and through her hair to the ceiling. My heart flared a little bit and I trod down hard on the floorboards but took her wrist. Bought it to my lips and kissed it – round and damp but firm like you know me baby. She gestured outside and said we need to find something and I didn’t know exactly what she meant but thinking what the hell close enough. She was chewing her cheek and fixed me with this warning squint, sortof a wary kid-glare that makes your ears twitch for an answer which I thought was sweet because it clamoured for confidence like please say yes please please. And so I said sure and thought it’ll make sense and I let my heart take my arms to her waist-side. I pulled her in and let it out so it felt like a flurry of drifting snowflakes and plus it was cold and plus I love her like don’t you dare even look you - . And I bowed my head and buried my face in her neck which was both soft and hard and flavoured with salty discontent. My heartbeat beat three-four thinking about hoisting her up onto my hips and getting the hell out there then like prairie desperation but I held my ground and just looked round the room feeling her pulling fists and cramming close a million miles from no's. Oh oh oh hiccups, breaking little pink rosebud oh's. And I stroked her hair and thought fierce of the rain. For all this breaking of teeth we're gonna go - Amy, oh Amy, my Amy -

" 'The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon' "

She swims in the pool. Each evening, as I step out onto the balcony, newly naked and ready for bed, I look down to see her. The first cool air of the day swirls around me, it clatters the brittle summer-scorched leaves together and spreads her silver form in the water's ripples. She waits for me and she gathers herself together - drawing in her refracted silver shards and straightening the wrinkled surface of our liquid sheets. And when the pool is still, with her sat whole and patient in its centre, I dive down, my hands parting the fat 'O' of her fullness. And her silver slicks over my skin, until underwater we are combined entirely. She is the cool gasp at the end of long wilting days. She is the quiet privacy that comes after too many brightly-coloured, noisy hours.

She is shy at times - drawn into nothing but a wry smile. But she always swells - slowly, seductively - until she is ripe and grown heavy on her rippled branch. And it is then that I dive into her, where she waits just beneath the skin of the water. I pierce it, fingers first, and swim inside her - the whole silvery pool of her, so cold it makes me shiver. And she pours into every crevice of my body and stains me with her shimmering colour. I stay under there, enveloped in her love, until my lungs claw at the walls of my chest and I burst forth, erupting in a shower of silver spray, and crawl onto the damp grass to pant and quake and drift off into dreams of my beautiful moon.