Civilization

The bleaching reek of sulphur stays with me but I have manufactured strings enough for a month or two.  With each shorter day the solar panels work a little less and voices, not vehicles, dominate the early dark outside.  In a last and desperate search of the travelling market I discovered a much washed, but intact, black dress.  It is soft and silent and deflects attention from me; this is the first time that I will be there alone.  
		Only what I do should be seen.
	Tonight is one of the last nights that we will spend in the open before the cold. We gather while we can at the ruin of the city’s centre.  The concrete bones and stairways are all that remain of the high rise block that still dominates the sky. 
	I begin the climb through the building, leaving the streets still busy with people.  
	LED lamps brighten the steps at intervals but on the roof we save the stored light and favour candles. The leftovers of the industrial age must be relished; they will not come again in my time.  Anxiety shortens my stride.  They crowd around the place where I will sit, a circle of ten or twelve deep. I unpack my things.  My mother used to tell us that the sun’s heat went to another world as the summer ended but tonight I see it in the fading moon and the emotion it reveals in peoples’ faces.
	Recently polished, and restrung, my mandolin has a clear voice.  For a minute my knees shake though the notes still fly. An inverted chord, an improvisation and the sense of travel takes me.  The melody moves outwards and answers its own refrain as they travel together, reinventing and redefining the long tale of this year.
	When I return, with the final phrase, they are clapping.  I can see the nearest faces smiling.  This will be the first payment for my passion.

(c) Rebecca Sowray

Civilization; a flash fiction story read by me.

Stipe, shoutout by Dee 106.3

Stipe, what's on - Dee 106.3

22nd January, Chris Sutton of Lache FM interviewed Richard Southern

Richard Southern interview with Lache FM

Anais Nin's Hejda is one of the first short stories I ever read; I was probably thirteen or fourteen.  

It's exquisite and each time I return to it I find something more in it. 

I wanted to share it :D

I can't find an audio or text version of this any where online.  It's one I'd read at open mic, if you'd lots of patience and beer, it's nearly twenty minutes so if you're sitting comfortably, I'll read you a story.

Anais Nin's - Hejda

A friend came up with the idea of life as alchemy and I wrote this as a response.  It was performed by the wonderful Operation Lightfoot at Threshold 2016.

Life Lived - a poem

Dee by the Footbridge

A single shoe, killer heeled, adrift.
Part of the sodden waste
no one cares to clear. 

The tide now getting high 
and too much grey brown water
creeps onto the river bank.

My hand trapped,
in umbrella violence.
Its rain burden weeping.

The railings, my nails,
paint cracked, skin peeling.
A job for warmer weather.

A bell rings in town. 
I forget to count the chimes,
and see nothing ahead.

Red with breathing, a runner,
his feet falling on the boards.
Too much life, behind me and gone.

The bridge rocks with his passing.
I hold tight in the reminder,
that I cannot stay.


© Rebecca Sowray 28th January 2013
