Tale time: the rain beats down

I love short stories with impact, with enthrall and with suspense.Don’t you?

How many stories offer the thrill of riveting suspense?
How many women live for their children and their husband?
How many live each day waiting? Waiting for what in essence?

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

‘The phone rings, it is pouring with rain outside and the kids are screaming. ‘Hello, Burton household’, she chirps, faking happiness.
‘I’m um..blank..call..ing..to..off..er’.
‘Listen, you are breaking up, hang on’. She mutes the phone with a cuffed hand. ‘For goodness sake, will you shut up , you noisy kids, I’m on a phone call’.
She uncuffs the phone. Muffled screams and taunts continue through the walls to the kitchen.
‘Sorry, what were you saying?’ She continues through the crackles, puffing on her now half lit cigarette.
‘I call from..Sc…on..doo..Maam..’
‘I can’t understand a word you are saying’, frustrated now her words mixed with fury, ‘the line is crackling’. A murderous scream drowns out her fragmented conversation.
‘Awwwww, that hurt, I’m bleeding’. Her phone call ends as she rushes to the adjoining room.
Terror marks the faces of her two frightened children as one lies motionless on the floor.’

A tiny tale: the yellow peg

Life as a yellow peg in Rome

“The yellow peg slipped easily from my fingertips. I watched as it spiralled to it’s demise. The unclean concrete below had become a meeting ground for others just like the yellow one; a coloured playground. Today the yellow could meet yesterday’s friend the green one.
‘Ciao’, a morning voice broke my concentration. It was my neighbour at the window in front of me, armed with washing and a handful of pegs. ‘Oh, ciao Monica’, we often met here at the same hour of the day, in the same pose. I continued to hang my laundry on the pulley system that had been created in this long trim courtyard in the centre of our apartment building.
‘Merda’, I heard Monica blaspheme as her pure white t-shirt drifted to the ground to play in the coloured playground. None of us ever rescued the pegs but clothing, well that was another story. Once retrieved it would be covered in dirt and grime. It happened to me once,frightened and vulnerable enveloped in the stale confines of the building, I’d grabbed my white singlet top streaked with dust and blackness and run up the four flights of stairs without stopping. They said rats lived below.
How I longed for a hills hoist. The laundry looked so happy hanging there as it twisted and turned, partying in the wind. I would watch it for hours when I went home on holidays. Watched it baking in the sun, whites whiter than white. The fresh and clean smell of happy laundry is something not easily forgotten.
The sun never reached the courtyard, my laundry couldn’t dance in the wind or frollick as it spun around. It wasn’t happy like the laundry back home.”

A controversial gypsy life in Rome

A sea of cobbled streets

The gypsy’s perspective is one that is not acknowledged on the cobbled streets of Rome.They are regarded as beggars and thieves. Maybe this is a fragment of what their lives might resemble if we were to walk in their shoes:

NAME: Cosmina
AGE: 40
Mother of four children
Lives in a caravan in the outskirts of Rome.
Gravely ill with MS (undiagnosed)

” I can hardly take a breath under here. The black hood covers my head as I inhale the filth of the cobbled road beneath me. The winter chill has possessed my bones and I am chronically sick. I have walked kilometres in the last few days. What I own is on my back, my feet are worn and dirty. They jeer me you know, they think I am vermon, they don’t know where I have come from and how much sufferance I endure. To them I am faceless, the beggar with no identity. Some toss me a few coins, others ignore me and one or two tut-tut as they pass. I hear them beneath my layered rags. I hear the words, the blasphemy. My numb hands rolled into fists are practically lifeless but my hearing is faultless.
When approaching footsteps hasten I know they will not stop or look my way but when the footsteps hesitate and then slow to a halt I know there is a chance the odd coin will be thrown my way.
They don’t know where I have come from and how much sufferance I endure”.

A tale to tell…transfixed by beauty

Santa Prisca, the Aventine church in Rome

“If I stood in one spot for this long there was a reason. Studying the oil painting, in the small and humble church of Santa Prisca in Rome, was mesmerising. I was transfixed, the detail in his cumbersome hands, the pain, the anguish and the solace in his virtuous face. How could it be that there was pain and solace? Broken fingernails caked with dirt and hardship. Yet his face was serene, perfect even as his head tilted upwards. I was the intruder as I stood unable to shift my gaze from the beauty before me.
The chatter of a group of tourists broke the silence. The adolescents whispered and sniggered behind faces that quite simply were unable to appreciate the significance or majesty of what was before them, juxtaposed by the modesty of the tiny church the oil painting was a masterpiece, hopefully one day they would recall the importance of their brief visit.”

To blog or not to blog…the power of words

He has an honourable stance, respected among his own kind.

The Stallion

This has been my dilemna of late. To share one’s thoughts, ideas and emotions with complete strangers and not just one or two but opening up your toolbox of thoughts to the universe. Today, however, I have decided to share a snippet of a short story I have written. I welcome your feedback, thus I throw my words out to you to be critiqued by those I do not know.

‘The stallion, now settled, stood still. His frame was strong and muscular, the sweat had turned into dry white foam covering his muscles. John began to walk him quietly to the small paddock he’d had the farm hands prepare today. The sun’s last ochre rays lit the darkening sky as John cautiously took off the purpose made noose. One of the rules in the horse industry was never show fear, as a horse can sense it a mile away. John had been breeding race horses for years and was well accustomed to this rule, he knew the beasts like the back of his hand. Once freed from the rope the stallion galloped off with fury and mounting confidence in his stride. He pranced; he swayed his head back and forth and put on a spectacular show. He pawed the grass and overturned the fresh soil, glad to be out of the confines of the float and away from human hands’.

Words there are so many and so much we can do with them, oh,the power of words…til next time…

Why being ‘Country Touched’ means more

Leaving behind the eternal city…

As an adjunct to yesterday’s blog ‘Country Touched’ I thought it opportune to talk about how I came to spend a year in Tasmania.
After much deliberation and careful planning which included selling our apartment in Rome, giving up our jobs (we were both self employed) and with a six year old and a babe in arms we took on the high spirited challenge to come to Australia to live permanently. We brought some worldy possessions with us in a container which arrived 6 weeks after us. Fortunately, we were able to live in mum and dad’s B&B which was fully equipped with everything. It was a great way to start.
For me it was a return to my homeland and for my Roman husband it was leaving behind his.

It is not easy to leave one’s home. What remains is the residue of token moments shredded into fragmented recall of time spent with family and friends. One tends to live in the past constantly reminiscing about what was and what was left behind. Don’t get me wrong taking the plunge and leaving your country is because you crave the adventure and something new or different from what you know. At least that was what it was for me when armed for adventure I left Australia. But after 10 years living in a foreign country. Which was always a foreign country even though I did call it home for 10 years it was not the country I was born in or did it have my close knit family. After the birth of my son, my second child, I felt alone and depressed partly because the hormones had kicked in with vengeance but also quite simply I missed the simplicity of the simple Australian life. I was born and bred in Sydney but when mum and dad purchased a thoroughbred horse stud in the North West of Tasmania, I fell in awe of the country life and land every time I holidayed with my little girl.

So now I’ll take you back to yesterday’s blog and hope that today it may make more sense to those who had wondered where it all began or how it had become….

In Rome getting close to nature is impossible and when you eventually come into contact with it, you are in essence ‘Country Touched’.
If my first novel memoir ever gets published then I do have plans to write a book about my year in Tasmania down the beaten track because it was an adventure splashed with the exploration of unknown territory in a little isle perched closest to Antarctica.

Thanks for reading…

In My Travels: Cattle Class

Does it get any worse than this?

Let me take a split second to off load my armful of barbies, pour a cuppa and sit in my writing chair. Let me savour this non chaotic moment for just a moment, thanks….

Ok, so I got to thinking, If one could eliminate the time spent travelling on flights to places far and beyond and just arrive… Wouldn’t they be an inventive genius? You know, ‘Like I Dream of Jeannie’? In the batter of an eyelid she was where she wanted to be.

Plane travel; it is not the place to spread out and relax if you are unfortunate enough to travel with the cattle. Moo. To extend ones limbs is oh but a dream, un sogno.One holds onto the ambitious ideology that the hours will eventually end (which they do) and that the confined space will be taken away. Feet will be put to steady ground and arms and legs will be free to fill spaces that they were intended to.
Another horrid flying fact is, what if you don’t like your neighbour? I once had a man sitting or rather lying next to me who picked and flicked his toe nails on a long haul flight from Sydney to Bangkok. I was repulsed, I was gagging and I was ready to vomit as I sheltered my toddler from the gruesome creature. But where could I go? What could I do? I reported him to the stewardess whose calm programmed response was to stare at me blankly and retort ‘there is nothing I can do Maam…’ I hate being called ‘Maam’ I find it a word that is degrading for some reason. That nightmarish flight lasted an eternity. We were prisoners. There was only a certain number of times that I could walk the aisles in a state of nauseated and sleep deprived zombieness. Thankfully, the gent in question was not on the next leg of the flight to Rome.

We travel to see and do. It is true ‘the more you see, the more you want to see’. Sometimes remaining stagnant and staple gunned to your own existence is a more viable altenative. Generally, you can save yourself about $2000 in flights and avoid an infuriating neighbour on a flight lasting an eternity.

Are we all really just gluttons for punishment or is sufferance more supportable than seeing and learning nothing?
Or maybe I should just travel business class, they say it’s definitely worth it. Maybe it’s like having an epidural as opposed to giving birth naturally.
But that’s another story…