I run a regular Zoom meet and read series called Yeah Nah. Check my website or Bluesky @pleomorphic2 for details. The next one is on June 1 at 4pm. Here is the registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/HP-eUxBAQnKXSz5pw67aWQ
At the last one, we ran an exquisite corpse and here it is in all its glorious weirdness for your delectation!
Exquisite Corpse Story Written by the Yeah Nah Group 3 April
Sumitra Singam, Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos, Cole Beauchamp, Kathryn Reese, Emmi Khor, Rananda Rich, Elisa Dominique Rivera, Isabelle Biondi Saville, Jay Chesters and others
My parents came to Australia with nothing but their dreams, so that’s all we had too. Papa’s was fairly straightforward - a circus, and he alternated between the strongman and the lion tamer. Amma‘s was a little more complicated. Sometimes it was a paint-by-numbers home with spotless white carpets and formless artwork on the walls. Sometimes it was the Klang River, a gaggle of children flowing and flicking like a school of fish. We made homes for ourselves in their dreams, my brothers and I. No one ever said it out loud, but as the only girl, Amma‘s dreams were left to me.
Her dreams were fragile and beauty just like her soul, a purity too heavy for my skinny shoulders.
What was I meant to do with such flimsy origins, organza and chiffon, wispy dreams and cryptic words, nothing to anchor my stick thin body? I was muscle and sinew, blood and heat, yawning hunger. It wasn’t my fault I hit her, it wasn’t my fault I left her behind.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t see properly because of the dust and the grime and the hot rain falling from the sky, hissing from my windscreen. The first rain is always the worst, making soap-suds from tyre-oil and first-fallen leaves.
Turning it all into slush that winds down the drains, coating those pipes into the sewers until it turns as smooth as a water slide. Then when the next storm washes in, the children jumping in puddles that turn into whirlpools, sending their laughter echoing underground, until they fall into a wondrous hush, deposited in a cavern.
Swimming among the luminescence, they giggle and laugh until Timmy gets tired. He can’t stay afloat any longer, so the older ones drag him onto the shelf, where they all pant with exhaustion then start to shiver. The luminescence, so bright to start with, turns icy, and they can’t work out if they are scared or just cold.
Only when the storm has passed, and the night is over, do they see the light of dawn peering through the cavern’s watery mouth.
It was a dark-ribena-purple-seeping-dawn. Not the kind you’d want to wake up to, but more to hide from. Under the doona of regrets and slobbering of want. Just before they had to jump into the blinding unknown…
Just before they had to jump into the blinding unknown, they paused for tea. I’ve found Earl Grey to be best in these situations, said the taller one, pulling a thermos from the inner pocket of their coat. The shorter one nodded. A good mug is hard to carry in times like these, so they drink from steel thimbles. Bergamot dances on their tongues before an aftertaste like coins slips through. They refill their thimbles for the fifteenth time, stare out into the blinding unknown which stretches through the forests to the east like a shadowy figure with a bony beckoning finger. To the west, the sea. Behind them, everything they know and cannot go back to. Not that they would. The first rule of The Organisation of Time Travellers and Tea Drinkers - never go anywhere twice.
Sam’s stern Prussian grandmother had always said if you’re burning a bridge, you might as well torch the village. She probably meant it metaphorically, whimsically even. But Sam’s family had profited from the Great Fire of London in improbable ways, and certain time-travelling family members considered rules to be more like gestures.
But a game must have rules, and broken rules have consequences. Every child knows that. Every child spends excess energies learning how their world works, and how to survive it, and how to manipulate it. Of course, some never grow out of this phase. They continue to rant loudly about rules - oh and wrongdoers and violators and punishments - simply because they do not want to feel like fools. Cannot. The world must have an order, and that order must have some principle to it. To admit anything else is defeat. These people (and they are always legion) took issue with gestures, with the squabbling over the ashes, and they began to talk of reckonings and revenge. Because rules do not just uphold order, they unleash chaos too.
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