AUTUMN WRITING COMPETITION
Dear Readers,
I am hosting a new Autumn writing competition.
The theme of your stories should be STRANGERS, in the broadest sense of the word.
You have until the 25th of November 2023 to get your stories in.
Please post your stories on this thread.
They be should be no more than seven-hundred and fifty words.
Because of the amount of reading that will have to be done, the competition is for paid subscribers only.
Write with freedom, without inhibition.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
Kathy at the Sink
"Bald, silent, a muscular physique." My sister, Kathy, describes a workman who had come to fix her leaky faucet this morning.
Before he left, they had coffee together. "Nice to have a man in my kitchen again." It sounds intimate to me because I'm American but, in the Netherlands where Kathy is, she's just being polite.
All day their empty cups and saucers remain side by side on the kitchen table. "When a visit is really cozy I leave the cups for a long time."
"He's still present."
She doesn’t clear the table till it’s dark out, after she draws the curtains.
Standing at the sink, she turns his cup around and presses her lips against the place where his mouth had been. Kathy tells me this, and nothing more. But eventually, I think, she will have to hold that man's cup down under water and drown it like a kitten.
Dancing with Strangers
It happened every night in Via Nicolò Mascardi. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would go down to her street. There was always a table and two chairs in front of her house, where she would sit and chat with a friend while the outdoor dining tables of the neighbouring restaurants filled up. At a certain moment only known to her, she would start the music on an old-fashioned CD player. The restaurant customers would look at each other, at the woman and the restaurant staff, only to see the waiters nod and smile at this familiar scene.
She always started off dancing by herself, getting into the moves. She was probably in her mid-seventies, and rather corpulent, so that no stranger would ever have expected the true extent of her elegance and skill.
At the end of the ‘overture’ she asked every male passer-by to dance with her. Some neighbours or acquaintances would stop for a joke and a few rounds with her, knowing her personal history. But her real challenge was dancing with strangers. Sometimes it took several attempts to get them on the dance floor. Most of them reacted by blushing, pretending they had an urgent appointment or that they didn’t know how to dance, that they had never danced before. She reassured them she would lead.
She was very confident about herself and her dancing skills. She told everyone that she had been a professional, that she had danced at La Scala in Milan... The strangers could not know whether this story was true or whether she made it up, every night anew. But her graceful movements and the way she took the lead with any man she had managed to convince, might have been taken as a sure proof of her story.
The first one tonight was a customer in a restaurant who was dining there with his wife; they had just been served the antipasto. She danced around their table, swaying her hips, looking only at the man who kept trying to ignore her by immersing himself in the delicacies on his plate. The prosciutto was exceptionally good. As her swinging hips came closer and closer, the man became uncomfortable and she asked him to dance with her. He smiled and shook his head. His wife tried to make a joke about him being a terrible dancer, but the woman didn’t even notice her.
He proved to be a tough nut to crack. When not even telling her life story could make a difference, she usually admitted defeat. She turned round on the spot as gracefully as she had come and didn’t look back.
Next came a group of four young men who giggled at the sight of her; she grabbed one by the arm and swung him around against his protest. His mates stood there transfixed, staring in amazement, and when she finally let go of him, they cheered and greeted him like a star, patting him on the back. These were the moments she loved most. Seeing the initial questioning, embarrassed, and even disparaging looks turn into admiration was like a drug. And more men were to follow. Once she got going, there was no stopping her.
And when she had exhausted many a man of a night in Via Nicolò Mascardi, when she began to feel dizzy from all this swinging round and round and round, she felt happy. The medieval walls of the houses seemed to swing with her, the whole street was her stage and the tourists in the restaurants her audience.
When she was lying in bed later, still half dizzy, she knew it had been a good night. Once again, she felt the gratitude and satisfaction of a successful evening’s performance, of having pleased her audience. The applause of a Scala filled with thousands of people resonated within her until she finally fell asleep.
Tomorrow, she was sure, would bring more strangers along her way.
(663 words)