Editorial?

This is not a story - it's just to say: thank you for reading our stories over the past month, it's been great, and hopefully we can do something like this again.


This week's update features three stories instead of the usual five (Nicola and Olivia are away).

Big thanks to all the writers for some amazing pieces and to Olivia for running the blog every week prior to this.

Enjoy and keep an eye out for more writing in the future.

Kimon

(Stories below)

The well-kept secret of Byron van Byron

By Etienne van Bart 

Byron van Byron
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Byron van Byron (born 8 June 1975) is a trance producer from Rotterdam, Netherlands. Since the 1990s he has consistently released a string of highly successful albums under various aliases. His productions and remixes have received extensive radio and Internet play, and they almost invariably do well in the dance music charts, often reaching the top. His music is played in clubs and concerts around the world.

An empirical fact

By Jess Richards

I guess I’m a journalist. Really living for what I do. Well not a journalist, more of a documentary filmmaker. I film, edit, interview, cut, you name it. I don’t make them yet of course, as I don’t have a camera, but I plan to. I have all the ideas. I have the ambition and I know what is important. Like, for one, I’ll never make wildlife documentaries. Those are for failures. Those people who do not have the gift have to resort to filming animals and go into wildlife films. It’s true.

Bottle it up

By Kimon de Greef

This is what the drunk feels as he swallows the liquid: shame, a clean burning in his throat, and then a glowing sense of peace. He puts the bottle down on the small table next to the telephone. There is a long wooden passage with doorways leading off on either side and at the end of it is the front door that opens out onto the street. The drunk peers down the passage towards the front door with its blue and red stained glass window and thinks, “I have to replace the burglar bars on that, I really must. I'll do it tomorrow.” But not now, it's nearly evening. He lifts the bottle and takes another drink.

Freckle

By Kimon de Greef

It was quite late in the night and we had been drinking. An empty bottle of wine sat on the table between us. We had stopped using glasses and a fair bit had spilled down the side and dried in a brown patch on the label.

“That stain looks like Africa,” my friend said. “Look – there's Somalia.”

Camera Rasa

By Etienne Van Bart

“Ian Ithsmith”! Ms. Christmas! “I know how to make a holiday last longer,” he said, and started moving in slow motion. Out at sea, convicts on floating chairs seated around a table eating their last breakfast, wondering who’ll be the first to lose a leg. Felix has sunk in his deckchair, so destroyed. Water melons genetically engineered to look like that square, patterned pillow. That light brown patch of sunlight on the canopy is in the shape of a scorpion!

The Garden

By Olivia Walton

I’ve only just moved back into the old house. Dust gathers still. I try to coax the rooms to life but they are stubborn. They hold their shadows and their windows will not be unsealed. I worked at them slowly, the first few days. Room by room, I thought.

Untitled

By Nicola Lazenby

She shook her head. Of all the things to do on a Saturday night in Barcelona. All it took was a Morrissey song she had only ever heard about twice in her life, and too many cheap Mojitos. “Take me out tonight. Take me anywhere I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care”... She wondered how many people Morrissey had gotten laid.

The Bookshop

By Jess Richards

Is this for free?

No its not for free.

But it has no price on.

Its not free. And the for is redundant.

What?

Nevermind.

Ah there it was

By Jess Richards

Ah, there it was. The green rotting lawnmower in the driveway. Like some neglected old man, turned vagrant, that had become stuck on a particularly large stone in the gravel driveway.

The Dark

By Olivia Walton

I always wake up before dawn. Habit. Funny that I don’t remember ever seeing a sunrise. They happen well after I wake but I am never there, watching. Maybe that is strange.

There are no lights in my room. I had them removed. There was no need for them.

Wilfred and the Rat

By Kimon de Greef

It is a week night and Wilfred Fiberglass cannot sleep. He is sitting on the floor in his kitchen with a blanket wrapped around his knees, thinking about the carrots in his vegetable garden. Are they growing, he wonders? As in, are they growing right now? – or, to put it another way, do carrots grow all the time, or do they sometimes stop for a break?

Death Makes a Mockery

By Nicola Lazenby

There is a grass embankment lined with six trees. They separate the houses from the highway that runs from town to the Atlantic ocean. A young boy chooses one specific tree for its handsome branches. They curve up and out in many directions, high up off the ground. From any one of them you can see out to Newlands, over Tokai across the Cape Flats, all the way to the mountains flanking Muizenberg. Sometimes, depending on which way the wind blows, you can smell the sea.

Groenkloof

By Etienne Van Bart

The sky was blue and the air was still above the seven levels of the Groenkloof Tennis Club, which sounded with an Afrikaans - accented woman’s microphone announcements. The brick path that opened up the grounds baked brightly in the midday sun.

Can you die from not being listened to?

By Nicola Lazenby

“Can you die from not being listened to?”

That was the question she had asked after regaining consciousness on the floor of a government hospital. Unlike the usual hospital smells  – disinfectant, anaesthetic, bleach, needle and bedpan metal – this hospital smelled organic. Like a flesh market. Sweet and rotten. The mortality market.

Was the landscape the day?

By Jess Richards

Was the landscape the day? Or the day the landscape? Hard to tell. The desert and timid shrubs stretched right to the edge of my vision. Meeting in some time equals space who gives a fuck kinda continuum. Like two flat pieces of bread laid open, like possibility split you know? The opening of that most simple question. And shit was it hot. The desert lapped like waves of heat at the edge of the road.

Untitled

By Olivia Walton

This was how it was for her.

Mornings were quiet (shadow quiet) and usually cold. Even in the summer the house did not hold heat well. 

Its floors were concrete and its eaves high.

Covered Tracks

By Etienne Van Bart

We approached the club. The veranda was crowded so I commented that the place was packed. My friend Eric knew the guy at the door and we got in without paying for our stamps. Inside, we waded into the packed dance floor, where electro was banging and kept near the edge, looking around. A stream of guys and girls was passing outside and Eric suggested we head that way for a drink.

Making Tracks out of Anything

By Kimon de Greef

I had a friend, up until about six years ago, who was a musical genius. He could compose a track out of anything. His name was William and he was short and very thin, with rust coloured hair and watery blue eyes. We would be walking together through the fields behind his parents’ house and something would happen, like a guinea fowl getting startled by the dog, and he would say, “That bird just squawked in G minor”. He always spoke softly, like he was listening out for something inaudible.