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Let's see if you can say that better. Or, am I even sure what you're talking about? Genuine clarity and your bulging vocabulary couldn't be more clearly delineated.

If you can speak you can write -- that's what Hitch used to say. The caveat is that the standard for speaking well is having others want to listen. A bad sign, then, when the writer herself is not engaged enough even to re-read what she had produced.

Know your subject. Know your tenses. Know the difference between a sensitive metaphor and a reductionist disaster.

You've clearly mastered the art of a Google search. But this millennial wealth of information must be examined in a way that is circumspect. This is not Britannica.

I fear that your teachers, while of noble intention, have singled out Wikipedia and social media as the enemies of objectivity. In so doing, they have given a pass to everything else and offered no fundamental lens of discernment through which to look.  

Remember, discrimination is not a dirty word. Once we get passed the tedium of 'more than’ and Oxford commas, then the real fun can begin. Identifying problems in a sentence is just a stepping-stone to noticing problems in arguments, inconsistencies in positions and data, and ultimately to seeing the wrongs in the world around us.

But for now, go out, copy and paste, recycle and regurgitate, safe in the knowledge that some ethereal gatekeeper exists to maintain the reputation of the masthead. Though, more likely sparing no thought at all.

And here I sit, hunched, in the shadows but for the incandescent glow of the MacBook Pro on my face. Know that my criticism of ostensible cruelty is only partly intended as such. The cruelest thing would be to say everything is fine.

Brendan McBryde

Borders of nothingness: 92 adjectives

Yukio Tamura walked down the slope under the ragged line of pine trees. Beneath the trees were the tattered remains of a collapsed stone wall. The grass was long and green and was caught by the golden light of the Sun just above the westward hills.

Maybe on those distant hills some peasants were returning with their buffaloes from the paddies, but here Yukio Tamura was entirely alone.

Accepting, accidental, alone, ambiguous, anonymous, artless, austere, blurry, broken, calm, cheerless, chill, clean, coarse, comfortable, compact, contradictory, corroded, crude, dark, deep, degraded, delicate, desiccated, desolate, dim, discouraged, dispirited, earthy, egalitarian, elusive, enveloping.

The bark of the tree was rough and gnarled and patterned with deep fissures and, across the outer planes of its surface, the trunk was painted with a pale blue-green lichen. Yukio Tamura sat and leaned his back against the trunk, adjusted his robe and began to chant his sutras as the sky billowed with ochre, vermillion, heron blue, soft owl grey.

His devotions done, Yukio Tamura pulled from his bag a roasted beni-imo. With some hijiki seaweed and dried daikon it made a meal and the swampy pool nearby provided a drink flavoured with earth and decay.

Ephemeral, faint, fragile, fragmented, hidden, homely, humble, idiosyncratic, imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, inconspicuous, indigenous, indistinguishable, intuitive, invisible, inward, irregular, lean, lowly, melancholy, minor, miserable, misshapen, modest, mournful, murky, natural, obscure, organic, overlooked, private.

There were, no doubt, theologians who held that a monk should not possess a hare-fur blanket but they, no doubt, slept soundly at night on soft tatami matting under piles of brocade, beside a warm hibachi and beneath a waterproof roof.

Beyond the pool, the damp ground was thick with tall rushes. Yukio Tamura crawled – in the growing gloom – between the plants and found a long, decaying leaf. Standing, he took the tops of the rushes he could reach and tied the tops of the tall leaves together with his impromptu rope. He crawled into his ‘grass hut’ and wrapped his hare-fur blanket around him.

Quiet, restrained, rough, rusted, rustic, sad, secluded, simple, small, soft, subdued, tarnished, tender, tentative, tranquil, ugly, unassuming, unconventional, understated, unencumbered, unprepossessing, unpretentious, unrefined, unsophisticated, unstudied, vague, withered, womb-like.

After morning devotions, the sky was a pale eggshell blue trailing to yellow oxide. Mist clung to the hollows, and all the grass and weeds were hung with spiders’ webs tricked out in a billion fine water drops. A single black butterfly rowed its way up into the sky.

Yukio Tamura untied the strand of rush from the top of his ‘house’ and the house disappeared as the rushes returned to their former position.

As he walked away through the damp grass, Yukio Tamura left a trail of green through the silvered sward where his passage shook the thick dew from the grass. But already that trail was fading as the grass dried beneath the strengthening Sun.


Dhiraja 

Spray and Wipe '65

Harry arrives for his 9:40 appointment. Veterans Affairs provide this seventy-three year old and other ex-military personnel like him with help with taxis and jobs like lawnmowing, window-washing and healthcare. 

We make our introductions and he removes his shoes and socks and sits on the chair ready for his treatment.   He is one of the lucky ones, one of the surviving few who have returned from participating in armed conflicts in the likes of Malaya, Guadalcanal, or in the Pacific, seemingly unscathed.  It is hard to imagine this now-elderly man crawling under a jungle canopy as I play the theme to The Rolling Stone’s ‘Paint it Black’ in my head while gripping his toes and feeling guilty that my limited knowledge of this conflict is in part gained from that 80’s series ‘Tour of Duty.’    

“We loved it when an American Iroquois flew overhead and dropped Agent Orange.  It was so bloody hot in the jungle and the spray was cooling; I rubbed it all over my arms and neck and the relief was immediate.  I would regularly take drinks from rivers that the spray would be dropping in.”

A window cleaner prepares his equipment outside and the mist from the hose creates a vibrant rainbow like fuel splashed in water.  I wonder if the sky was a cascade of swirling rainbows as the turbulence from the helicopter spun the toxic payload. 

“Weren’t you in the slightest bit worried about it?” I ask as I am reminded of other soldiers who were shipped in to the Pacific to witness atomic bomb testing and being told you might see your bones in your hand despite having your eyes shut firmly.

I detect bitterness in his reply towards a government that was the slowest to recognise the damage from the chemical.  Next week Harry is off to the dentist, also provided free.

“We couldn’t use toothpaste; the enemy would smell it even from three or four hundred metres away.  For all that though, I never had any effects from Agent Orange and I’ve smoked all my life.  Some of my mates though, cancer got ‘em, and I’m not sure about my grandkids…”

The twenty minutes is up and I rebook him.   Outside the dry leaves skitter in the autumn air and I consider if bare trees might take him back to that place.   Even in the surrendering April midday sun I can envisage this small man sitting in the park under the very darkest part of the biggest and broadest-leafed tree.  He is scattering his sandwich crumbs to the birds and about to light another cigarette while other park visitors might have suspicions about the elderly man sitting in the dark shade.  He has everything he needs.

Andrew Hawkey

Folkind land

In the mist of the stony forest there emerged a man. He was as high as he was wide, and he made a flip-floppy noise as he walked over the rocks with his bright orange shoes. 

”There’s a large folkind past that mound over there” he said to Flossy. Karl Edgar was used to these creatures, and had learned to live peacefully alongside them. Recently however, they had started to bother him. The day before last, he had found one of his bright orange shoes stuck in some sticky pink goop. Flossy had had to find the sharpest tool to prise it off. 

She was a kind old soul, with a blue bandana and a constant look of concern. ”We’d better get back to the homeland quickly” she said, not wanting a repeat of last time. They were finding they were visiting the folkind land much less these days. More and more ugly grey constructions were gracing the land, and they didn’t fancy it one bit.

They held hands as they found the entrance to the rock, where they were instantly transported back to their own lands. Lands of thick moss spread over and under the rocks like a sea of green. In between the mossy rocks are the valleys that Karl Edgar and Flossy have made home. 

Although they are pleasant and easy to get along with, they prefer their own company and spend their days enjoying what the land has to offer. It was the twenty-sixth day, and on this day, and every twenty-sixth day since a very long time, Karl Edgar and Flossy have headed to the shores of the blue current to pick their most prized cloudberries. They were cautious to keep their patch secret, as there was nothing else quite like it. 

Uella Watson

Simon

It was cold in the cave – numbingly, bitingly cold; and dark – as dark as death.

I had walked through the bush – ponga, mamaku, hinau, rimu, moss – and crawled on my elbows into a small hole in a bank. One might not even have noticed it there in the lush vegetation.

Through that liminal hole was a different world to be explored – huge caverns, tiny passages, cliffs, columns, iron stalagmites.

2017: ‘My mum was put on a train,’ Simon Coencas said. It was 77 years since his mum was put on a train.

In 1940, Simon had crawled on his elbows into a small hole in a bank in the Vézère Valley. His friend’s dog had found the hole and it led to – the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory: caverns covered in the greatest artistic creations of humanity – horses and buffaloes and star charts painted 20,000 years before – the caves of Lascaux; art so powerful that those boys, Simon and his friends, stood before them hot with extraordinary emotion, the first people to see those sublime works for twenty millennia.

Simon must have held that vision in his heart when he was in the ‘sorting camp’. He was released because he was under the age of 16. ‘My mum was put on a train’ – a train to the chimney smoke of Auschwitz.

… though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness to the light because their deeds were evil.

And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being exposed;

but whoever lives by the truth comes out into the light so that it may be plainly seen that what he does is done in God.

It was cold in the cave.

A scree slope led down to the pool. The water flowed into that pool from a fissure in the wall – mandorla, vesica piscis, almond. I waded across and into the crevice. The walls were rough enough and the passage narrow enough so that I could perch a foot on either wall and so avoid getting jammed in the narrow bottom.

The water roared through about waist deep.

By this time I was 45 minutes from the surface.

Half way down the passage, there – sitting on a rock rising from the roiling water – caught by the light of my lamp: a green, jewel-like frog, still and contemplative as a tiny Buddha.

Since Simon’s grandchildren were born, 122 species of frog have become extinct, a third of all species are threatened – just another tiny part of the Anthropocene Extinction, only the sixth mass-extinction in over four billion years: our fleeting and universally destructive lifetime.

But deep in that cave, the delicate skin of its tiny throat slowly pulsing, sits that frog.

Barnaby McBryde

Harry and Annie

Harry crawled backwards towards the ladder and felt for the top rung with his right foot.  He moved the other leg gingerly and placed his left foot, expecting solidity from his weight digging the ladder into the soft earth. Instead, the ladder jerked a little. He clutched at the roof as the ladder slid and slipped, tipped to the left. For a second, he was suspended above the anticlockwise trajectory. As he lost his grip, he heard the metallic ricochet rattle.  Harry fell, dumped in the leaf litter behind the hydrangeas.

He tasted blood, stinging scratches on his face from sharply pruned branches.   When he tried to lift himself on to his elbows, searing pain stabbed in his right hip.
 
“You old prick,” he shouted towards the brilliant blue Good Friday sky. “Happy now?”

There was no answer.  And there was evening and there was morning: the first day.

Harry heard the telephone ring inside the house.  Bloody HRV again, or a distant Asian voice inviting him to take a survey. No-one rang now, not since Annie had gone.  She had the friends, church committees, volunteer groups. Her job, keeping in touch with the family, remembering birthdays and school trivia. Not his thing.

He was thirsty again and sucked at droplets of water shivering on the nearest hydrangea leaves. Not much going in but still he needed to piss.  Where did it all come from? Warm wetness flooded his groin and then turned cold.

He woke later, sure he had heard a voice.

“What are you doing there, Harry?”

… Annie?...

“How many times did I say don’t go up the ladder when you’re by yourself?”

He couldn’t see her, even when he twisted his head behind as far as he could.

“You’re not here. You’ve left me … by myself. I think I’m .. going to…die …”

“Pray, you old coot.  Ask for help.”

Pray? How? He hadn’t done that since he was a nipper.  Oh God… are you there, you old bastard?... Is this it?

The telephone rang again. And there was evening and there was morning: the second day.

Harry opened his eyes and saw an angel, golden hair haloing her face.

“Jesus Christ, Dad. How long have you been lying there?  I was ringing all day …” She broke off, and he heard a sob.  “Oh, no, don’t tell me…”

Harry lay back and closed his eyes again. The angel was talking to someone, loud and insistent. In the distance he heard music, a two-tone chant, the heavenly host getting closer and closer.

I’m coming Annie, he thought and smiled to himself. I’m coming.


Rosemary McBryde

April

The nights are fair drawing in - for those of us in the south anyway.  April's starter is 'In the shadows'.  Looking forward to your thoughts and creative interpretation.
Contributions to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 30 April.  Happy writing.