Lily's Friday Prediction

So the clocks go back in the UK this weekend. That extra hour makes a huge difference. I should say that gives us an additional 60 minutes of writing but to be honest I welcome a lie in. No doubt my littl'un will decide to get up at 5am so it'll all be moot anyway.

But writing I will do. How about you?

Winners of Last Week's Prediction Challenge

The 'Stonehenge' word turned out to be somewhat limiting, I thought. But as always you rose to the challenge and came up with a plethora of different entries, all brilliant if I may say so.

My winner is Asuqi with A Profound Mistake. Mysterious and chilling this tale left a very clear and disturbing image of the child-vampire in my mind. Now I want to see the movie please. Congratulations Asuqi.

Runner-up is Aidan with his second entry, Bautastenar. Cleverly lulling us with this romantic proposal only to steal Love from humankind forever. Profound. Very well done Aidan. Enjoy your trip down under; we shall miss you!

Words for 28 October 2011

Will Halloween influence your entries this week? No obligation - but I hope you have a very enjoyable celebration. Here we go:

• Girdle
• Spanish
• Ruin

Ooh - I like! Good luck everyone.

Rules

The rules are: 100 words max flash fiction or poetry using all of the words above. Please add your entries in the Comments box below. You have the whole week until 9pm UK time on Thursday 3rd November to enter.

Winner will be announced next Friday 4th November. If you can, please tweet about your entry, using the #fridayflash hashtag, and blog if you feel like it.

Undo those literary ribbons and release your all. I'm peekin'...

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Mammoth Competition - Runner-Up: Asuqi

Asuqi uses words like creeping tendrils; they penetrate your emotions then whack! she slaps you with something so unlikely, so bizarre - yet acceptable. Whenever I read her fiction I come away feeling I have learned 'the big answer', but somehow, can never recall what that is.

Asuqi is the third runner-up in the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol 22. competition. Her story Born This Way tore at my heart. Wrap your own up carefully, then read on...


Born This Way by Asuqi

During daytime, she walks pleasantly two steps behind. Simplifies her language and diminishes her thoughts. Behaves.

During nighttime, in her dreams, she’s in a twilight park in some old European town. Statues and fancy buildings; stone, stone, stone. She’s on a balcony, in a hotel maybe? And so far the dreams are okay. But her view is over those statues, and one of them seems closer, more important, like it’s been chosen for some reason. It stands tall with its back at her. As she watches, it moves closer, fills her view, becomes a monolith of religious proportions, and then it turns to face her. It’s as if though she’s holding a breath, one she won’t ever release, because when it turns, she sees its face is gone, replaced by a smooth rubbery surface. It moves to speak, but the surface won’t open and the statue makes a chewing movement, stretches its stone flesh in despair, and the scream she hears would have been her own if she’d been able to let go of that breath.

She wakes up and flings open the window. Takes deep, dry breaths. Tries to regain balance. Initially it works.

One day, on her way to work, a crow dives and hits her. It’s immediately stuck in her long hair. She and the bird are both thrown into full mode panic. It tears and claws, and she falls, they fall, her perfectness a mess. She lies face down, paralysed, and the crow stills, exhausted. She stays put as nights grow longer and ice creeps slowly over every available surface.

The Winter forest freezes everything, dreams too, and there is a calmness in that. Hungry little ones come to sniff and search; to taste the crow’s scraggy flesh. Its bones rest lightly on the back of her head, a styrofoam structure left to pale and weather. And she feels oddly cleansed.

It’s Spring when she returns to civilization, hungry. There is a difference now, for when she finds food she eats. No questions asked, no hesitation and she’s not going to back down.

She dreams again. When the monolith turns to face her, its features are the crow’s. She sees it’s not perfect. It’s not desirable - not the preferred result. But it is. It sees with unblinking crow eyes and when it opens its beak to speak, its roar; her roar, is magnificent.

The pretty is no more. She gains fearlessness. She says no and if necessary, she strikes. People avoid her. She’s called crazy, dangerous even, but it’s a small price to pay - the dreams are gone.

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Bio: Please accept me as Asuqi. I find horror difficult to write, it's so easy to make shallow rip-offs and so hard to find an angle that communicates something truly scary. Trying to write horror scares me, but is that an angle? I´m eternally confused. Visit me for random confusions at http://asuqi.blogspot.com

Enter the live labyrinth of Asuqi - February Femme Fatale.

February Femmes Fatales -
February 18th 

This second piece of prose from Asuqi perfectly demonstrates her art. She has a unique attitude, studded with astute observation and delivery.

Betrayed thunders through the subject of abuse, at the heart of which is a little Alice lost and ever on the escape yet trapped by affection and loyalty.

For me there's a 1950s feel to Betrayed with deliberate exclamations to contradict the tragedy; unnerving as Sylvia Plath poetry.

Enter the maze; may you follow your own path...

Betrayed by Asuqi

This is a confined space, too narrow to live in or like, but it’s what I’ve got left and in a way, I suppose it suits me.

I lost myself in a labyrinth, the pretty one, in our vast garden. My sisters were snatched away from our lovely childhood by a monster too abhorrent to speak of. Me, I chose the maze.

Try chasing me here! Try finding me! I’m lost, I’m lost, impossible to find!

I spent these long years ensuring the labyrinth’s utter complexity. I recreated the paths, reorganized the hedges. I made a science of intricacy.

I sometimes see my sisters cry, the monster’s shadow heavy on their chests. I turn to lightness then, bend myself backwards and spiral away – I only dance abstract pieces.

The laces I’m wrapped in are my mother’s from a lifetime ago, I think the monster wanted me in them, but I can’t discard them, freedom is not mine to take.

Oh my God! He came for me! Last night in my dreams! Soft brown eyes, wine-scented kisses and his treacherous hands fumbling under my layers of lace.

My heart and my thoughts fluttered endlessly then, like the delicate membranes of a butterfly.

"Someone ought to have saved you," you say, your eyes a glacial sincerity. "Someone should have come for you!"

But there’s no one left, you see! And the softness in my eyes is as brown as his. We’re two of a kind, and this is what holds me secured more than anything; his body so close to mine, our minds entwined, the horrors he performed - are they the tales of my soul?

So I stay here, trapped, between him and myself. If you hear me scream, please go away, if I plead just leave! I´m ruined beyond salvation and if you come from a place of light, your heart pure and sweet, just forget about me, for I will turn my face to you, and I cannot promise my smile won´t be his.

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Bio:
Please accept me as Asuqi. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. So I go about searching for near-life experiences. I know them when they hit me, they tickle my brain. I only have questions, I am Jack's complete lack of certainty. Yes; "Fight Club". Always.

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Asuqi - Wednesday's February Femme Fatale

February Femmes Fatales - February 2nd

The first time I read one of Asuqi's entries to the Prediction I knew her voice to be absolutely unique. Over the following weeks she revealed herself to be an ethereal poet in the world of fiction, dancing between such clever combinations of words as to make me gasp.

In this, the first of Asuqi's two pieces in the February Femmes Fatales showcase, she demonstrates in under 150 words how fear touches our lives in very real terms. Chilling.

Abnormal Growths in My Plastic Mind by Asuqi

She's ill, really ill, but with an operation she could have a chance.
Only she texts one of our co-workers an early morning in September to tell us that they opened her and found metastasis all over the large intestine, it was like abrasive paper, she said, and they couldn't do anything so they just stitched her up again and she would call us when she had the strength, to tell us what would happen next.

Where they will go from here.

There's nowhere to go, I think, and start fortifying myself because one of these days she'll come visit us and I'll have to act normal, say good things, be supportive.

But I can't help thinking, it's death that'll come visit, and what if, when I hug her, she leans in to me and whispers in my ear:

"I'm passing it on to you."
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Bio:
Please accept me as Asuqi. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. So I go about searching for near-life experiences. I know them when they hit me, they tickle my brain. I only have questions, I am Jack's complete lack of certainty. Yes; "Fight Club". Always.

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