Omen Weather

Today we’re having omen weather, the clouds are making fantastical shapes. They drift and twist before my eyes. I can’t possibly make out what they all mean, most of them are not meant for me. Who are all these shapes meant for? Some are there just to entertain. There’s a really good one of a small dog with a feathery tail. A West Highland terrier by the look of it.

I see my sign, the one meant especially for me. It’s a dragon, a proper Chinese New Year’s dragon. I can see its gaping mouth. That’s really interesting because I saw the same thing last week. I’d never seen such a thing before. Usually my dragons are fanciful seahorses, very rare as well. They’re always shaped like an ‘S’.  Once I saw three together, a very propitious omen. Two weeks later my whole life changed.

There’s rules, of course. You can’t spend your days staring at the sky. You cannot look too long. The brain will make sense of the shapes and colour the sky with your idle dreams. There are too many false omens as it is.

You need to catch them out of the corner of your eye when you’re not wishing, not brooding or sad. A clear eye is needed, they’re best noticed as you go about your business. When nothing particular is happening to you, that’s when you can see what will happen next.

This omen sky needs a good clean wind. It’s best not to dwell too much on the future.

An omen, but not meant for me.

The Old Man’s Glasses

They came to me eventually, shoved in a box with his wallet, the scratchy faced watch and a mobile phone he never answered. The Old Man’s glasses. He often said he could see his friends through them, old friends gone a while ago. He knew they were already gone because they didn’t get any older. It worked with me too. Even after I’d turned fifty he could still see the child in me.

I tried them on, they weren’t too bad. I guess our eyes were very much of the same type. That was good, so I kept them as a spare pair. My own are fairly scuffed and scratched, plus I’m often too lazy to give them a good clean.

I was back in the town for his funeral, just for a couple of days really. I’d not lived there for thirty or more years. I hadn’t made frequent visits back either. As my parents slowly died I could not bear to be there. Now I can see it’s not a bad place really, not a lot has changed. I remember being happy when I went to university here. The pubs are pretty much the same as they were. I can’t find the record shops we used to haunt, but record shops are rare everywhere these days.

In the streets I see faces, a lot of them familiar, still young. They were the type of girls I adored from afar, or chatted nervously to in the uni bar. There’s young men too, almost comical with their unlikely beards. Hey, I was just like that!

I must be wearing the Old Man’s glasses, I can see what he said was true. I might be looking at ghosts and phantoms, or maybe they’re the grand kids of long lost friends. My Dad was not upset by his visions of the friendly spirits he saw. Me neither, it’s rather charming in its way.

 Some flash fiction for a Sunday. I wrote this one on the train going to the shops. It’s not the Faber Quickfic challenge this time, I’ll save that one for later.

Even after I’d turned fifty he could still see the child in me.

Another exercise for the Faber Quickfic contest. The challenge photo was of a young couple dancing, probably from the 1940s.         This is what I wrote.

A Good Time Girl

My granny was a Good Time Girl, she told me that herself. ‘Use capitals’, she’d said, ‘it was the name of our troupe.’ She’d fought her war by dancing, church halls, bases, work canteens. The nurses said they liked her, she laughed a lot and joked. Some of the other ladies were not so keen. She flirted with their boyfriends, that was what they’d said. Poor boys who’d died in ’42…. still alive in memory, brought back to life by dementia. Perhaps it was true, back then in some dance hall before the sirens went.

Flirted, well she might. Not too much though, she was devoted to my grandfather. He was Diamond Jack Wilson, always good for a song, a dance, a laugh. The war took him, gun crew in North Africa. Nothing much left to bury, they’d said.

In the end she forgot almost everything. No one there ever forgot who she was. She’d been somebody, she always said that. It was true. It seems recent, but it’s thirty years now since she went. I was a young man at the funeral, surrounded by her old pals, laughing, croaking, sounded much the same really.

Now they talk to me in loud kind voices, as if I’m deaf or daft. Just like they talked to her. Always my first name,that’s annoying. No, I’m Mr Wilson to you, young woman. I’m going to need my granny’s strength, her wicked laugh. I’ve got to start telling them, I’ve been someone, you know.

Had to add one of my own photos. When my grandmother was young, dream palaces looked like this.

Tuschinski Theatre, Amsterdam

Last Friday I was lucky enough to be a runner up in the Faber Quickfic Weekly Challenge.  It’s a lot of fun to do and it’s good exercise for a wannabe writer like myself.  I took my photos for this week’s photo challenge on Bradley’s Beach. I took the liberty of inventing a journal entry for the Lieutenant, who enjoyed pretty much the same view as I did.

From the journal of Lieutenant William Bradley, 7th March 1788.

After a day’s rowing from Sydney Cove we had made good progress. Following a somewhat turbulent passage across the new bay we had landed at a sheltered beach on a small island. It being coming on for dusk, there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. I was struck by the way the sailors appeared to consider their labours light work indeed. My knees and calves told me I was no longer a young man, but I had not time to stretch my legs.

I set the men to casting the nets and shortly we had a good haul of the local mullet. Our shared meal was a jolly one, considerations of rank being little observed. I believe we all felt the same exhilaration that evening. I can still recall the lapping of the calm water, the gentle noises of the forest at our backs. Above us, the stars were fiercely clear, an unaccustomed blaze of signs, symbols and pointers. I had seen the skies above the Southern Seas many times, but here I was struck by the newness of the sight. An idea possessed me somewhat, it was I who was the newcomer. This was an ancient place. The sea and the stars had been here since they had been first made. We had sought to bring the place into our own era, but I felt myself carried far back into a time I could scarcely imagine.

Bradley’s Beach, Dangar Island, Australia