Tag Archives: Writing

Water Cure

“Drink.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Drink, I say! You look very thirsty.”

“But… Hey, what are you doing?!”

Streams of water pour on me. I try to face away… I try to cry foul… but my voice drowns in the streams.

“Drink!”

I splutter. I cough. A gray dusty clot, almost weightless, lays inside my empty head. Dehydrated words are tied in a bunch like Chinese tea.

“Drink!”

I choke. I’m full of water. The words start to spin in the whirlpool and swell. The words take shape and color. The gray dusty clot unfolds inside my head… blossoms… and slowly fills the entire space. Now there’s nothing except a big moist poem here. My head is full of the poem, like a tiny teapot with beautiful blooming tea.

“Well, my girl… Now… do you realize how much you were thirsty?”

“Screw you…”

I wipe my wet face and cuss mildly. She smiles and says something… but I don’t listen to her. I open my laptop. WP Admin, Posts, Add New…

by TETIANA ALEKSINA 
© All rights reserved 2015

CRACKED FABLES // The Ant and the Cicada

Imagine, if you will, a field in Boring, Oregano. It’s a blisteringly hot summer’s day–the kind that makes bark peel off trees to find shelter from the sun’s calamitous gaze.

Cicada is lazing about wearing his customary bling. He’s chomping down on stogies while flipping through the latest copy of Big Buzzo Jumblies. This is what you do when you’re young, dumb and full of hum.

Ant, meanwhile, is nearby, huffing and puffing with a heavy trolley load of corn ears and woodworking equipment. She’s taking these essentials back to her place. She’s got a big project in mind…

“Wassup playa!” says Cicada. “Haul ovah’n rap wit’ me ’steada toilin’ moilin’ tha whole dam’ day!”

“I beg your pardon?” says Ant.

“Holla at’cha, yo!” says Cicada. “Hang wit’ me ho, ’steada slayin’ biz wit’ da wheel whizz!”

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” says Ant. “You do realise you’re not a gangsta rapper, don’t you?”

“Dawg, I’s that’n a bag o’ potata chips!” says Cicada. “Badassical!”

“I see,” says Ant, not seeing. “Here I am trying to build a shelter and lay up food for the winter, and all you can do is waste time showing off your posing pouch and speaking gibberish.”

“Yo, winta ain’t no thing but a chick’n wing!” says Cicada. “Sitch is I’skin already gets me eats an’ alcamahol and tasty blo’ hos any time I want!”

“Ooohhh-kay,” says Ant, rolling her eyes. “Have a wonderful summer then.”

Ant goes on her way to begin preparations. She sets about converting her place into a cosy, fifteen bedroom tree house with a spacious observation deck and outdoor heating. It’s from here that she plans to spend the winter, kicking back with a hot toddy, warm muff, and popcorn to view the Pleiades in all its stellar goodness. She’s really thought this through, you see, and stocks her new home with more ears of corn than one can poke ears of corn at. When the renovation is complete, Ant names the revamped abode Lady of Patience.

Winter eventually rolls around like a dial on an oven set to ‘Off’ and, predictably, Cicada has no food left by this point. He’s dying of malnutrition in a gutter. His rudey dudey mags have blown away to more clement climes. Even his bling has lost its zing. Ant, on the other hand, is spending every day on her deck, nibbling hot buttered, microwave nuked popcorn from the stores that she’d collected in the summer.

Cicada looks up from his self-inflicted misery and sees this. He finally swallows his pride, drags his sorry, withered arse to Ant’s door… and knocks. It opens, and there she is, looking down at him. His mouth opens–as if to say something contrite–then, changing his mind, he pulls out a piece, guns her down and takes all her stuff.

The moral of the story? “Good things come to those that wait.” Sure. Why the hell not.

by TONY SINGLE
© All rights reserved 2016

Jarrytale

modern Andersens write
without mistakes and blots
instead of candle light
they waste kilowatts

a tin soldier is no more than
a shell for microchips
Lukoje is a horseman
of the apocalypse

a little match girl
burns a town to ash
Thumbelina rides a merle
guarding a Mole’s arms cache

…the only misfit
was a nightingale
she doesn’t give a shit
she left the fairytale jarrytale

by TETIANA ALEKSINA
© All rights reserved 2016

1, 2, 3… Aspirate!

Gentle readers, were you aware that ‘aspiration’ has two meanings?

Of course, ‘aspiration’ usually refers to hope or a strong desire to achieve something, but it also refers to the mundane yet necessary process of breathing in and out. We cannot have one thing without the other. You see, hope is absent when we’re no longer breathing. And breathing without hope is like being dead already.

As long as we’re still standing here breathing then let’s aspirate, yes? Let’s dare to reach for the impossible–even if just for a short time–for tomorrow’s a blank page that hasn’t been promised to us. So, shall we fill the blank page that sits here with us today? Right now? In this very hour? Yes. Let’s do that instead of waiting for tomorrow’s pages.

We’ve had a wonderful year at Unbolt. Tony joined the fold and filled up the space with words to complement Tati’s own. We featured some of our treasured readers’ own works. And we received quite a number of awards and writing challenges too!

To celebrate the amazing year that was, we at Unbolt have put together two pages dedicated to the awards and writing challenges we’ve received so far. Why have we done this? Because we want to share those awards and writing challenges with you, dear readers. It’s our way of saying thank you for your support. You mean a lot to us. We want you to know that we appreciate every single one of you! So, please, feel free to click through to the Choose Your Award! and Choose Your Challenge! pages, and have fun!

Oh, and may we also wish you a Happy New Year? Yes, a new start full of breathing and aspiration. Just what the doctor ordered!

Yours ever,
Tati & Tony

by TETIANA ALEKSINA & TONY SINGLE
© All rights reserved 2016

GUEST POST // Writing To Heal Feature: Tony Single

DREM: How old are you, my friend?

TONY: I’m in my forties, a fact that still shocks me constantly. There are days when I feel so much older than that, and there are days when I feel like a boy pretending to be a man and nobody’s noticed yet. When will I grow up? And how is it I’m not dead yet?

DREM: Where do you live?

TONY: Put it this way… I wouldn’t mind living elsewhere. I live in a quiet neighbourhood close to the city. There’s a smattering of wild life here which is nice. It’s nice to hear the magpies warbling in the mornings. It’s not so nice to have big dogs barking at you from behind fences. Big dogs give me the willies, even when I know they can’t possibly get to me.

DREM: Do you have a profession besides blogging?

TONY: I’ve had a string of jobs in my life. When I was a Christian, I worked at a religious book store. I sold flowers door to door at one point. I was a glorified photocopier jockey at a university one year. The longest I’ve held down a job was as a cleaner at a milk processing factory. Thankfully, I wasn’t mopping up after cows. I was cleaning offices. Still, it wasn’t glamorous, and it was pretty thankless. The only time I heard from anyone was if they wanted to complain about the unseen speck of dust lurking behind a fridge or something. Presently, I help to run Unbolt and I concentrate on my webcomic too. I also do whatever I can to make my wife’s home life just that little bit nicer.

DREM: When did you start writing?

TONY: It would’ve been when I was in high school. I didn’t have many friends during those years so I’d hide in the school library every lunch time to read, draw and, of course, write. Looking back on it now, it strikes me how desperately lonely and disengaged I was. Everything I wrote was about life not being worth living and how I needed to not be here any more. I filled entire diaries with these thoughts and it astonishes me that I never acted on them. Perhaps writing it all down helped me in some small way to still feel anchored to people. To this planet. Hell, just to the fact of my breathing in and out.

DREM: How often do you write?

TONY: I write every day, even if just a few lines. My thoughts are scattered at the best of times so it’s always a good idea to corral them whenever I can. I have a note book and pen on me whenever I’m out and about, and there’s always stuff to write with and on within arm’s reach when I’m at home.

DREM: When do you write and how? Like, in a journal, on a computer, and what time of day?

TONY: I write in the aforementioned note books. I hardly ever try to compose something on the computer. For some reason that never feels right. I don’t know why. Perhaps there’s an immediacy to jotting your thoughts down as fast as they’ll come that typing lacks. I don’t know. However, when it comes time to work up a second, third or umpteenth draft of something that’s when you’ll find me perched at the computer. It’s a lot easier to make changes in a Word document than on a page with mostly everything scribbled out. And as for when I write, there’s no rhyme or reason to that I’m afraid. I write whenever stuff hits me, and that can be late at night when I should be in bed or in the middle of the day when I’m taking a piss (or having the piss taken out of me).

DREM: Why do you also Write To Heal?

TONY: I have to. That’s the simplest answer. I have depression, severe body image issues, and I can’t grow a manly beard to save my life. I’ve spent decades of my life pretending I have it all together. I clearly don’t. This is not something you can just talk about at the local pub with any passing stranger, or even your closest friends for that matter. People get scared when they see that you’re scared so I write it all down instead. It’s my outlet. It helps me to let the doubt and grief and self hatred flow into something productive, something creative and potentially beautiful. Does this process heal me? Sometimes. Do the results heal others when they read it? I can hope.

DREM: Why do you continue and has it changed?

TONY: I continue to write precisely because not much has changed. Certainly, I’ve lived longer than I expected to. I fully expected life to have broken my heart to the point of laying down and dying by the time I was twenty. Zip a few decades later and I’m still here. Yup. No one is more surprised than I am. What isn’t surprising is how difficult I still find it to connect with other people. And I still want to bash my face in whenever I see it. Oh, and the black dog? She continues to use my leg as a chew toy every other day. So, what do I do? I continue to write. It’s the only thing I know to do. It’s the only thing that makes sense of all the other things.

DREM: What dreams do you have for your writing?

TONY: I didn’t really have any until recently. Two women in my life have spurred me to believe that anything’s possible again. My wife got the ball rolling with her belief in me, and Tetiana has kept the ball rolling with the projects we’re currently working on together. Before all of that, I’d resigned myself to obscurity and disappointment, but now I find I’m actually confident that we will achieve something! I don’t know what exactly, but at least it doesn’t feel impossible!

DREM: Where do you find your most inspiration while healing?

TONY: I find inspiration mostly in music and stories. There are a handful of bands that I adore like My Silent Wake, Wovenhand, Amorphis, Dead Can Dance, and The Cure. Their lyrics never fail to transport me to some other place where emotions can be reconciled in some way and circumstances can play out differently. As long as I can hear another story then I can entertain hope for my own. I’m also hugely into comics and anime, and the idiosyncracies of those mediums are what drive me in my own creativity, to improve my craft in any way I can. And last but not least, there are the handful of people in my life who inspire me too. I wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for them. My wife. My parents. My sister. Tati. I hope I’ve sufficiently conveyed my love for them because, quite simply, without them I’m nothing.

Interview by DREM
© All rights reserved 2015