The Bunny Chronicles

Well I can’t lay claim to be clicking the button, but I can lay claim to producing and art direction I guess…  it was my idea god dammit and I made it happen!

The Lady in the Jade Shoes

Sheer laziness… but here is an poem I wrote for Side Street, Sydney….

The Lady in the Jade Shoes

The lady in the jade shoes does not see, she does not hear.
She perches out front, a preposterous rear.
With a smile like a frown and an eye like a snack,
She clutches at my toes; a marshmallow attack.

The lady in the jade shoes cannot find her apron string,
It hides under the couch with the busted spring.
She screeches and sweats and flails a loose fist,
But it ignores the game, doubting that it’s missed.

The lady in the jade shoes is a steely bowl of custard,
Too certain, too sure, too wild, too flustered.
Monday to Sunday, she never sleeps a wink,
Doing everything and nothing, like a flatulent stink.

The lady in the jade shoes pumps her valves from afar,
Grateful I am; I do not share her proud boudoir.
A curiosity shoppe of the wicked and the weird,
She opens her doors but the chitlins are afear’d.

A Short Story? The Crooked Nun Whispered.

I have been away… hence my recent quietness here.  I’m part of a writers group that sets prompts each week and thought I’d pass onto you the short story I wrote this week.  I was given three words; a noun, a verb and an adjective and these were to form the title of the piece.  The words I got were:  crooked, nun and whisper.

The Crooked Nun Whispered

Tabitha’s gaze is directed at the blue flicker of the television, but it is a gaze with all the warmth and life of an abandoned rundown house at midnight.  The kind that packs of local kids dare each other to enter only during the safety of a sweaty, luminous mid-afternoon summer.  She reaches for a tall glass of tepid water from the cheap, aluminium card-table beside her.  A dampened doily sticks slackly to the grimy glass as she drinks.  As Tabitha places the glass back onto the table, it clumsily topples over with a loud metallic clank.  She glances at it sideways but pays it no attention.

Tabitha is frail and insignificant in the vast cushion of armchair that envelops her.  The room is dark and thick with dust.  You can smell it.  There are no photos on the mantle.  No pictures on the wall.  No memories.

The television clicks off and Tabitha walks to her bedroom with a pained gait, something more than just old age. She undresses and every movement of her torso is fraught with agony.  A long puckered scar is still clearly visible through her wrinkled flesh.  It isn’t fresh by any means; it is white and faded but is such an unnatural shape and angle that it dominates this tiny woman.  Tabitha neatly folds her synthetic floral t-shirt and long, loose black skirt and places them onto perfect piles of identical clothing.  Beside the uniform stacks, is an old biscuit tin, the sort that holds those sugar-crusted, dry shortbreads that catch in your throat. She fishes out a worn, tarnished crucifix and stands in her greying bra and sagging underpants fingering the cross intently.

Sleep does not come easily to Tabitha.  She groans and grunts with every twist and turn.  A bottle of sleeping pills sits invitingly on the bedside table.  It’s half empty and has been a constant friend, but tonight she refuses it.  Won’t even look at it.  Her eyes are furiously staring at the ceiling as if her sleeplessness is somehow the fault of the stucco; as if somehow the peeling paint is the cause of her pain; as if the ton of concrete above is capable of reaching into a woman’s chest and tearing out her heart.

Refusing the sleeping pills is dangerous.  It means revisiting the past, whether she wants to or not, because lying in bed during the howling hours opens the shutters that Tabitha keeps battened down during daylight.  She tries to ignore the encroaching darkness by smothering it with other memories; brighter, whiter, shinier memories.  Days in the sun carefully watching teenagers in school playgrounds making sure they aren’t too close or too excitable or too naughty.  A job she enjoyed.  She lets those pictures crowd-in and hopes it will be enough; its futile of course.  It is never enough and she knows it.

Tonight the darker visions come creeping, edging their way into her consciousness.  Tabitha inhales deeply, holds her breath for just the briefest moment, then croakily, she whispers, a keening, aching whisper “why have you forsaken me?”  There is no reply.  The room is silent.  But she waits because this time she expects an answer.  It doesn’t come.  Her brittle fist thumps the bed beside her and a hoarse, angry whelp escapes her.  “Why is my imperfection not enough?  I am not a god.  Why can’t you”… she stops abruptly.  Barely a sound escapes her lips, “… save me”?

Minutes pass; the woman lays unmoving.  Her anger leeches out of her slowly, in inverse proportion to the oncoming raft of black memory.

A hidden corner of the playground, a group of snarling boys approach.

She reaches for the pills and swallows 2 dry.

Her wrists and legs pinned, tearing and kicking.

Sleep is poking its way into her brain.

Aching thighs and unknown wetness.

Slumber grabs hold of her eyelids.

A glint and thick blood everywhere.

Sleep wipes the boys from sight and carries her away.  For now.

Manboob Monday #19: Hello Boys!

You know, it wouldn’t be creepy if guy on right wasn’t enjoying quite it so much…

Tuesday Timeshift #15: District 9

Can’t be bothered reading an entire review? Check out my Haiku Film Review. Otherwise keep reading!

If you’ve somehow managed to miss all the advertising, the internet chatter, the general hype-i-ness that is District 9 let me take you back.

A couple of years ago, South African ad director Neill Blomkamp made a little short film called Alive in Joburg.  It traversed the globe quickly, thanks to that handy little distribution channel you and I know as YouTube, because it was clearly high quality (and had a decent budget) but mostly because it’s an intriguing idea.

How would we treat refugee aliens marooned on our planet?  According to Neill, not all that nicely.

Peter Jackson – yes, that Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) – thought that might make for an interesting feature film.  Ch-ching!  It sure does.

Uber-real, tense, graphic, sad, interesting… how many more adjectives can I use?  Just be glad I haven’t started in on the superlatives yet.  It’s a film that defies it’s sci-fi label because the fact that they are aliens is somewhat irrelevant.  It could be any disenfranchised refugee group.  Setting the movie in Johannesburg, while natural due to the films origins, is poignant because it is a city which today still struggles with significant race issues.

It’s got the requisite extremely effective CGI and the appropriately chest thumping explosions, don’t get me wrong.  But just don’t write District 9 off as a sci-fi movie or a boy movie or whatever cliche’s you want to to apply.  It will surprise and entertain but it also has a very serious point.  Not just on the grand scale of mass refugees but it can be boiled down to more local, more immediate circumstances.  When you treat those weak than you like animals or criminals they may well rise to meet your expectations.  This is a lesson that we’ve seen time and again in our refugee detention centres that we don’t seem to really learn.

Or you can ignore all that and just see an entertaining film.  Either way, go see it!

Opens everywhere this Thursday.