The Writing Process

Draft 1: Steve bought a cup of coffee.
 
Draft 2: Steve bought an extra-tall, triple-shot, non-fat latte.
 
Draft 7: Steve bought a grande latte from the pretty girl behind the counter.
 
Draft 11: Steve bought a latte from the smiling waitress who reminded him of his mother.
 
Draft 24: Steven Blake purchased a foamy latte from the waitress who looked uncannily like his mother.
 
Draft 46: Steven Palmer-Blake pulled out his gold credit card and paid the pretty waitress for his triple-shot, extra-tall, non-fat, extra-foam, mocha-latte with extra sprinkles, all the while thinking how much the waitress looked like his recently deceased mother.
 
Final draft: Steve bought a cup of coffee.
by
Scarlett Sauvage
@ScarlettSauvage
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to writingprocess@adhocfiction.com

Striking Time

Every night she would hear his key in the lock exactly as the pips went for the six o'clock news. He was as reliable as the bell chiming the hour. Tonight, something was different. The hour came and went. The hands on the clock slid round to quarter past.
   When he arrived, he was flushed and merry. "Didn't notice the time," he said, kissing her stiff cheek and spinning her chair in the direction of the kitchen. She thought she caught a whiff of perfume.
   "Big Ben's getting a facelift, did you know?"
   She stared mutely at him. He smiled, holding the cup to her lips."About time someone looked after the old chap. It'll give him a new lease of life."
   He whistled as he raised a spoonful of slop to her mouth.
   "I might be late again tomorrow night, love. OK?"

✉

Credits

fiction by
Roz Levens
@RozLevens

image by
Safia Begum
@saf_begum

©
creators 

Black Ice

Do you know if you spread too much baby oil on the body your skin becomes a slippery slide? If you place your feet on a wooden floor, that floor then becomes like black ice. And as you slip and slide like a novice ice skater without the skates, you try desperately to hang on to something sturdy, something that will keep you upright. But your hands, your slippery hands slide off the bedside table, and the door handle rejects you, and now you’re flapping around wildly like a bird just learning to fly, or a chicken who has just lost its head. And as you call out to me for help, I reassure you that I will get a towel. But what I’m really doing is removing myself, so that when I call for the ambulance I can tell them with complete sincerity, I did not see you fall.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Kereen Getten
@kereengetten

image by
Anastasya Shepherd
scarletline.com/ashepherd

©
creators 

One Morning in May

'A cup of tea would be nice.' he said as he looked behind her to the wardrobe which held their lives in clothes and their dead dreams in a box wrapped in a blanket and tied with a sash. Among the shoes and boots which had walked the fields and paced the corridors of sleeplessness for the twenty years it took to raise the sons who wanted a sister whose curl of golden hair occupied the dead dream box. A day of a million tears shed over tea and whiskey in stained mugs and cloudy glasses because no-one noticed the unimportant things that became unseen in a house where, before, a stained cup was a mortal sin, but now the sin was the loss, the theft, the emptiness, the memories.
    She brought his tea, placed it against his lips and they both sighed as their eyes drifted towards the wardrobe.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Alva Holland
@Alva1206

image by
Linda Grierson-Irish
lindagriersonirish.wixsite

©
creators 

#Notmydream

We sleep through the alarm. Curled like torpid dormice, our body heat cocoons us in blissful ignorance. Together we fly, soaring high in shared dreams: fantasy worlds where tolerance, understanding and kindness are the trending hashtags. The day is on hold. The screaming headlines are still muted until clicked and set free.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Tracy Fells
@theliterarypig

image by
Anastasya Shepherd
scarletline.com/ashepherd

©
creators 

Blaško

“Here in Moklište, every story is like the cosmos, with ever-smaller systems fitting neatly into one another – a galaxy, a planet, a continent, a country, a province, a town, the present, the past, the grandpast, the great-grandpast and so on, until we get to the myths, which are each based on their own stories, passed down from generation to generation.”
    His voice fills the library like the creaking of a waterwheel, churning in the stream of his thoughts. He pauses. In the candlelight, the suits of armour, petrified by dust and web, hold their breath. Only when the pilgrim looks up from his hands, sleeping on a bed of shavings in his lap, beside his penknife and the whittled stake, does Blaško continue.
    “You can never tell the whole story, which is why it is always best to begin at the end. The present. Where we are now.”
by
Richard de Nooy
@RicharddeNooy
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to blasko@adhocfiction.com

The Sac That Was Our Living Room Ceiling

The flat upstairs. It's their escaped water, low slung in the sac that was our living room ceiling. Icy cold drops sweat along the pregnant plaster, grow plump, fall down - we had to move the couch. The floorboards are dotted with filling bowls. Some day (or night) soon, the whole lot's going to finally burst. My family nag me to call the landlord but I hate confrontation. I say I'll call him tomorrow, after the weekend, after Christmas. I know they're losing respect for me over this. I hate that I'm supposed to be the one to deal with problems. This isn't our country. I don't like to make waves. Meanwhile, the sagging over our heads undulates and sways with its own incomprehensible tides.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Nick Black
@fuzzynick

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

©
creators 

Bar


Dumped. On the edge of Leeds, just a stone’s-throw-away from dead-end-alley which she teeters down in her six-inch heels and fake furs ‘bloody useless’ against brutish winds. She’s feeling out-of-sorts.

The doorman dressed in his best, draws back from the devilish cold as our blue lady enters and sheds off her skins into the closet. She rouges her lips then click-clacks across marble to sit high at the bar and fiddle fingers around rings, till the man unhangs a polished glass on display and swills in a G&T to slide over. Another double, he positions by her elbow and jerks his thumb at a smoking silhouette in a hat. She keeps her bright eyes away from rebel’s corner, but quaffs a hand under her hair, swivels her twizzler to excite bubbles to fizz in her gin and wonders where a warm taxi might take her as she sips her pick-me-up.
by
Ruth Tamiatto
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to bar@adhocfiction.com

Different Strokes

The dried meat hung next to her. Speckles of brown and red pricked its surface. Had she been vegetarian, before this? She needed to get out of the room. Shiny floors stared up at her, daring her to try. On her plate sat three tired tomatoes. She rolled them around as if that might prompt her disobedient tongue to curl into the right shape for words.
   Red-circle-no. Close enough. She hated the things.
   A girl in starched white leant over her. ‘In we pop, Alison’. One tomato was spooned into a space on her face. She tried to chew.
   In the bed opposite, a man as old as her father smiled with one side of his mouth. She glanced back at the meat to her right with its five familiar fingers.
   I’m only half here.
   ‘Yes, lovely tomatoes,’ said the girl as she stroked away a trickle of escaping saliva.
by
Stephanie Hutton
@tiredpsych
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to differentstrokes@adhocfiction.com

Bound in Smoke

Blackened branches, white with ash at the ends, dumped on the patio when we were done prodding. Embers gagging on the lack of oxygen after hours of burning in our makeshift back garden barbecue: an oversized tin can so charred we could only remember it was once for olives.
   Flaky ash lying on the window sill and the seats we had made on stacked breeze blocks and an empty blue plastic milk bottle crate. Debris so integral to our garden life we'd forgotten any urge we had, on moving in, to buy real outdoor furniture.
   Leaning in against the back door in the light from the kitchen, my spiral bound notepad, biro tucked through the wire.
   “Alright?” His eyes were blazing clear.
   The things we had written. Words and thoughts scorched and bound in the smoke.
   “Yeah. You?”
   “Yeah.” We meant it, no need to say more.
by
Claire T Allen
@lipbalmy
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to boundinsmoke@adhocfiction.com

New Math


Negotiating the cafeteria was what Square Root dreaded most about her first day at Weirdly Q. Showoff Performing Arts School. A clattering symphony of equations and functions buffeted her ears. With fours and nines piled on her lunch tray, she searched for an empty seat.

Square Root set down her tray at the logarithms’ table. “Oh please,” a log sighed. “This table is for high end computations. You need to sit with the babies at the fractions table.”

At the fractions table, everyone had Spongebob lunchboxes. And the chairs were too small. Not for her. All the forces at the Newtonian mechanics table wore velocity letter jackets. They grunted and glared when Square Root passed.

A dotted i waved her over. “What are you guys? Apple products?” Square Root asked.

“Nah. We’re imaginary numbers. The jocks and the cool kids won’t hang out with us, either.”
by
Caleb Echterling
@CalebEchterling
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to newmath@adhocfiction.com

8 by 3

He remembers so many wars he can count them on both hands and feet. His face is a map of worries, drawn deeper by nicotine. His skin’s as pale as tracing paper, blending into the walls. Grandad says he feels old as time.   
 
The afternoon after his 90th birthday he gets a shovel from the shed. He walks bent double to the rosebushes, a clockwork toy slowing down. With an aerosol can he sprays white lines on the lawn.  
 
The wind whips his silver hair across his face like a shroud but he doesn’t stop. He works like a 20 year old, the spade gliding through the frosty earth like water. Inch by inch he removes the soil, the darkness leaving a perfect void.  
 
Soon there is no more time.  
 
Now when I hang out the washing the smell of tobacco lingers among the roses.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Christina Taylor
@Chrissie72

image by
Firdows Kahn

©
creators 

Not All Points of Sail Are Equal

If you were a schooner, you would outrun the swiftest, you with your mad eyes locked on elusive prizes, trying to shoot the bar before it shoots you. Steering and trimming and trimming and steering, leaving the safety of broad reaches, risking side-swipes from the heavy boom. You would careen as you drew closer to the wind, pushing for the horizon, a-tilt, blinded by spray, moderation foreign to your one-man armada. If you were a schooner, you would forget the simple lessons of Newtonian mechanics: all with or all against the gale’s force is never as safe as a steady beam reach. Closer and closer you would haul your craft until you were, at last, in irons.
     If you were a schooner, you would end locked in a standstill, pointing toward an edge where dreams and fate coalesce, with no hope of further motion.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Christina Dalcher
@CVDalcher

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

©
creators 

The Definition of Us


Cast. verb
direct one’s eyes at someone
(see Object of Desire, specifically, You)
Caste. noun
class of people with exclusive privileges
(see Social Status; Father’s Business Partner)
Cast. verb
shape a substance by pouring it into a mold
(see Arranged Marriage, Heterosexuality)
Castigate. verb
punish
(see Name-Calling; Compliance by Force)
Cast. verb
shed skin in the process of maturation
(see Personal Growth; Me)
 
Castaway. noun
person rejected from society
(see Disownment; Choices)
Cast. verb
let down an anchor
(see Stand My Ground)
Castle. noun
large building fortified against assault
(see Walls I Can Build; Strength)
Cast. noun
actors in a play
(see You and Me; Two-Woman Show)
by
Christina Dalcher
@CVDalcher
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to thedefinitionofus@adhocfiction.com

Husband's Decline

After he retired, husband spent his days cleaning the house. It became an obsession. He bought all sorts of dusters; short fluffy ones, long-handled ones for the high up places, thin flat ones for the inbetweeny spaces.

He started to sweep away belongings. Shoes, crockery, DVDs. Then the cat, the car, our friends, the world outside. All brushed away and never mentioned again. I thought he would miss the cat.

Then he swept away our children. First Sarah, our eldest. She had always been his little monkey, hanging round his neck. But he whisked her away without a second thought. Then James, then Michael.

I thought that was it, there was nothing left to lose. Then he took up the fluffy duster and I was gone.

All that was left were a few old photographs of himself as a boy and a scruffy old teddy that smelled of his mother.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Katherine Latham
@kath_la

image by
Jon Stubbington
www.recycledwords.co.uk

©
creators

down-the-drain

Close Shave

Pain, if it could be called that? No no, that's not it.
Raw and humming.
Undercurrents of seared heat. That was it.
A thick drop of blood
explodes above the blank curve of the white marble sink.
A parabola, a topological space, a set of points clustered in equal
dimensions, a god damn
deformed line.
The drop gathers again after impact, diluted now by shards of old sinewed water. Gravity and momentum push it toward the plug hole, next stop?
The sewer and onwards to Dublin bay.
Face never ever clean.
Shadows, always shadows.
Morning - noon - night.
Pluck a clean razor, try again, 140 times until it's right.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Luke Timmins
@luketimmins77

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

©
creators

no-yellow-brick-road

No Yellow Brick Road

Rain lashed the pavement like some crazed madam punishing her disobedient slave. Puddles formed, puddles merged, puddles began to take over the world. Plastic bags, soggy leaves, and small children were whipped up by the wind. Clouds loomed within touching distance, squeezing the space between heaven and earth. Soaked pedestrians with useless umbrellas leant into the the storm.

I’d looked forward to this. I’d wished away each hour of hiraeth dreaming of Welsh rain. Funny how the mind plays tricks; conjuring scenes of romantic walks on misty cliffs, wet Welsh drizzle from Dylan’s mind. Not scary, apocalyptic storms when it feels like the house will fly and you’ll wake in Oz, desperate to click your heels and get back to Cardiff. But there’s no yellow brick road or tinman, just a squall of rain smashing into my window pane, then silence. The calm in the eye of the storm.

✉

Credits

fiction by
Gareth Davies
garethdaviesauthor.blogspot

image by
Małgorzata Warmińska
instagram/gosiawww

©
creators 

My Husband


I took husband and put him in a jar. I placed him between the sugar and tea. He looked good there, with his permanent three day beard and birdnest hair. And grimace.
 
I open the jar on Sundays only, when he's well-rested and he won't shout at me like a savage. I take him to the pub. We stroll in the park. Stroke a puppy. I kiss him, he's happy. We stare at the lake. Feed the ducks. I tell him the plan and he nods. I guide him into bed. He's a good boy. We hold hands and watch the sunset.
 
The truth is I can't open the jar. I've tried everything, knives, spoons, gripping with both hands. 'I can't open it from the inside,' he tells me. I shrug. Don't worry, one day we'll have everything worked out.
by
Bogdan Tiganov
Can You Illustrate This Piece?

1. Read the details here
2. Send your art to myhusband@adhocfiction.com

A Kiss of Sorts

He peeled a first class stamp off the folded rectangle of card, warm and concave from the wallet he carried in his back pocket. Licking had been better. When you licked a stamp a piece of you went with it; some bodily fluid, a kiss of sorts, a teardrop, or a spit. This letter should have all three. He wrote his own address on the envelope, but not his name. He wrote her name, without the ‘Mrs’. A ‘Mrs’ would imply a future. She would recognise his handwriting of course, and she’d have been expecting something, a text or an email. She’d know it was terminal when she saw a letter. A licked stamp would have carried his dried up kiss and a tear. She deserved that at least. And the spit? Well perhaps the spit was in the letter; a clearing of the throat, some acid reflux, a goodbye.
Credits

fiction by
Steven John

©
creators

image by
S.B. Borgersen
www.sueborgersen.com

✉

Project Calm
Ad Hoc Fiction Autumn Special Winners

Winner

Kate Carne

Runners Up

Jacqueline Carter & Kandi Thornton

project-calm-smallCongratulations to Kate, Jacqueline and Kandi. And huge thanks to everyone who entered and supported our Ad Hoc Fiction Autumn Special with Project Calm. These winning fictions will be available to read in the next issue of Project Calm, sold across major outlets from the 24th November in the UK, and the 24th December in the US.