RWords #2 and #1

While I'm on the subject of random-word freewrite responses, here's April's first 2 ...

{Rest assured, I'm not turning this into a RandomWordBlog, it's only for April while I've been the chooser :-)}

Fi
xx

#2

Outdoor café

She was always confusing Minmutia with Rissia. They were both market towns, they were both exactly 9 miles away from where she lived, and they were both dominated by a long high street. So yes, that was understandable. But they were really very different as to the sort of independent shops that they contained.

What was so similar, she supposed, were the terrace cafes that had sprung up in both towns recently. Probably since the smoking ban inside public places, she thought.

Boring.

Once upon a time there was a terrace café overlooking a small harbour. The terrace was cut into the Cliffside, not as high as the Minnack theatre in Cornwall, not as low as the Marsden Grotto in Tyne and Wear, sort of middle-heightish.

You gained access to the harbour café from two directions, from inside the cafe itself or from the beach up a flight of narrow stone steps.

The steps were old, old, old. And had started to crumble a little on their sea-ward side.

Susannah had been a fisherwoman for sixty years, but was retired now and living in a beach hut at the end of the beaches where the harbour café overlooked.

Every day for ten years, she had climbed the narrow stone steps up to the terrace and had ordered bacon and black pudding baps and a pot of earl grey tea for her brunch.

One day, half way up she stopped at one of the steps that was crumbling. What was that buried inside the stone, starting now to peek out from where it had been buried, maybe for hundreds of years? Something green and shiny.

Susannah leant down and picked away at the stone.



#1

Blue notes

They were everywhere. In all shapes and sizes, from post-it notes to pages ripped from various exercise and jotting books to the massive mural on the west-facing wall. On all media, because they were carved into the bookshelves, painted on the lampshades of two standing lamps, dyed into a blue shirt nailed to one of the wooden panels that lined most of the room.

A thousand shades of blue, either in the ink or paint that was used to write with, or on the papers themselves.

The floor was carpeted with them. No wonder she'd had trouble pushing the door open.

Delize was still standing in the entrance to Victoria's library. The light in the room shifted, the day growing older outside of the open curtains catching her attention. She didn't know how long she'd been standing there, first shocked by the sight of the room, then not wanting to go inside, start seeing more and more of the words written on the notes, fearing all of the unknown that was just about to happen, not wanting to disturb for ever the state of this room … the state that Victoria had left it in … looking to be the last communication between Victoria and the rest of her world …

A fluttering in one corner of the room startled Delize out of her suspended state. A blue butterfly flew around the library, alighting here, alighting there, almost casually.

It was enough to break the spell on Delize. She took off her shoes and stepped into the room, into her dangerous adventure.