100 words/Drabbles

Goodbye

~ Paula Harmon ~ 3 Comments

Ben holds one hand. Teddy holds the other. My feet are sore. Ben has a bag with some food and water. Maybe we can stop for some soon.

We had to leave everything else behind. It’s hard to wipe your eyes when a teddy’s holding your hand.

‘It’ll be a great big adventure,’ comforts Ben, ‘we can look after ourselves. I bet we’ll meet dragons and giants and aliens and everything.’

‘Will it be scary?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.’

‘Will we never ever see home again?’

‘Never ever.’

‘Never ever?’

‘Well,’ says Ben, ‘not till dinner-time anyway.’

teddy

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

 

From a prompt on Thin Spiral Notebook – check out the others

Cold

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

At nightfall, she lay down on the pier, her head on a carrier bag full of her last precious things: photos, letters.

Eyes closed, she listened to the sea wash the sand and shingle: whisper, rattle, whisper, rattle.

She waited for cold and hunger to take her, drifting into a sleep where the letters and photos seemed to be speaking to her, seemed to embrace her and then she realised that the voice and the touch were real and the voice was saying:

“We’ve found you! Wake up. Your family has been looking so long. They love you so much.”

shadow

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Thin Spiral Notebook: Hunger

Contraband

~ Paula Harmon ~ 7 Comments

I smuggled her home in a basket. The girl said I was saving her from drowning.

In my bedroom she emerged: little more than a kitten, silky black but for one white star.

I called her Magic.

Outside, the family cat growled.

I confessed to my animal-loving parents. They wouldn’t mind.

“We can’t keep her,” said Dad.

Days later, I overheard him: “So sad. Full of kittens. They put her down. Couldn’t re-home them all.”

Oh Magic, all these years later I remember your trusting eyes and know that by rescuing you, in the end, I betrayed you.

magic-cat

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

This is a true story. Many years have passed but it still makes me sad. Prompted to write it down by this week’s Thin Spiral Notebook prompt.

Ghost Coin

~ Paula Harmon ~ 5 Comments

My husband removed the 1980s bath-panel and found something bizarre.

A 1914 penny under an upstairs bath in a 1950s house.

We put it safe and ‘Googled’. In 1914, a penny bought half a pint of beer or loaf of bread or pint of milk.

The penny’s since disappeared.

Our friendly ghost’s playing tricks again. It often plays piano or rattles pipes. Bet that’s who put the coin where it shouldn’t have been.

No doubt it’s now sloped off with phantom mates to buy spectral beer at The Headless Spook Inn, which I suspect is in our attic.

Typical.

ghost-pint

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

From a prompt on Thin Spiral Notebook

My Father’s Eyes

~ Paula Harmon ~ 6 Comments

They changed as you read; narrowed for villains, opened wide for victims and frowned for determined heroes.

You made us giggle by waggling your glasses and eyebrows.

You blinked as you marched us on sunny fossil-hunts, you peered into books and squinted at handicrafts you’d start but never finish.

Your eyes grew tired, old. One day, your eyes smiled love as we said goodbye but two days later, though they blinked, you were no longer there. Then they closed forever.

But I will only remember your eyes, sparkling as you told stories, bringing the characters alive, twinkling with love.

dad-in-pizza-express

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Prompted by Thin Spiral Notebook

Justice

~ Paula Harmon ~ 4 Comments

I don’t know whom my ancestors supported in the English civil war. Their voice, their sufferings, during the republic’s creation and dissolution are, like those of most common men lost to history. Battlefields have been reduced to tourist attractions.

I weep for ordinary people like me who send their last tweets as bombs fall after another failed ceasefire. Tourist attractions are reduced to battlefields.

The murdered, the displaced, the orphaned are hard to unsee or unhear.

When our descendants decide on this war’s  “worth”, at least there is a little justice in that the common man’s condemnation is broadcast.

corfe-2_edited-1

Corfe Castle – destroyed in the English Civil War, now a tourist attraction.

Words and photograph copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Prompted by Thin Spiral Notebook to write 100 words exactly about “Justice“

Dancing in Amber

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

autumn-4

Flame haired girl peeps from the forest
with her hazel eyes, warm in her dark orange dress.
Amber glimmers secretly
from her ears and throat.
Leaves crown her:
gold and yellow, jasper, topaz and garnet.
She looks through misty skies at empty fields,
the crops gathered, the soil dozing.
Berries like fat beads glisten in hedgerows,
rowan and hawthorn, pyracantha
and gorse and heather range like flame
across the moorlands.
The sky darkens earlier and earlier.
Soon, all will be dark, and cold and lonely for the sun.
But for now,
the Spirit of Autumn watches us,
crowned in leaves.

Words and photograph copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon.
All rights belong to the author
and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Loquacious

~ Paula Harmon ~ 3 Comments

My lecture was so dull I bored myself, tailing off down an alley of inconsequence to the dead end of momentary silence until, with rising excitement, I found the side alley of potential controversy and entered it with brief anticipation of provoking interest; the eyes of the older members of the assembled teenagers coming back to life for the few seconds it took for my stress addled brain to note the teachers’ anxious tension as they braced for any risk my words might pose, whereupon I stepped off a metaphorical pavement into the path of an oncoming bus – destination: failure.

pink

Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

From a prompt from Thin Spiral Notebook: a story in 100 words in 1 sentence.

Homespun

~ Paula Harmon ~ 12 Comments

“I’ve bought you a loom,” said Dad, fancying self-sufficiency.

Mum was planting potatoes, while his thoughts shuttled off, wondering about getting a pigpen.

Indoors, my mother, tense as warped yarn, wondered how she was could cook with this monstrous machine filling our dark kitchen. Selvedges would run parallel to cupboards while the beam abutted the range and to weave the weft she would have her back to the sink.

One day, the loom was gone.

Despite Scots blood, Mum never wove the tweed suit Dad planned. I think she made a table mat.

He’s lucky it wasn’t a shroud.

weaving

Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Prompted by the word “Yarn” in the Thin Spiral Notebook. (NB this is a true story.)

Reflection

~ Paula Harmon ~ 6 Comments

At seventeen she made up to impress, half of her face at a time; one side flat porcelain, the eye enlarged with kohl and mascara, the cheek blushed, half the lip glossily plump; the other side, uneven, natural and pale. For a few seconds her face displayed equally what she wanted to portray and what she hid.

Now nothing can smooth the shadows and lines but she doesn’t care, because they represent who she has become. She will leave the room with a little make-up, or maybe none. Her friends are waiting and they look only at her heart.

mirror hand

Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

From a link on The Thin Spiral Notebook page. Check it out.