Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

Outside the cornershop a dog had died.  The heat had accentuated the stench bleeding off the carcass. Some number of flies had made it their new water cooler. Discussing filth, presumably. Across the road, in between the impatient footsteps of city-ridden mental illness, I saw two pigeons. One slightly larger than the other, with a lighter hue of that bluish grey they possess. He looked well-fed; well, as much as a city pigeon could.  In Bournemouth, in the gardens of the house to some Victorian eccentric expatriates, styled with old stone, vines and exotic flowers to look like a narcissian stage, a certain pigeon had once paraded the lush koi pond, adorned by gentle fountain faucets and hydrated foliage. He was a royal-looking pigeon, their Prince on his travels, a young Siddhartha but with vanity and less commendable intentions.  The pigeon on the London road that day could have had this beauty; he was lucky to only have the few scars. Behind him was a smal...

The bulbs of the Empire, a proscenium preserved in aspic, flashed out the name of my first show. Some would say it was not ‘my’ show, that I was just the scriptwriter, but authors are tyrants and I knew it was all me, me. I walked round to stage door with a feeling that, although everyone down here on the city streets didn’t know I’d written the Empire’s newest musical, if they hadknown they’d have revered me very much, and this lent me the power of a dormant volcano. I entered stage door and – OH! – what a sight. At the desk sat a short hairy man who harrumphed and curtly asked me my name. He was a sprite. Standing near, three or four bored ushers who were clearly waiting for Cassandra Fleming-King or Walter Godolphin, to harass my beautiful actors with flattery. ‘Molly Mead,’ I said. The sprite scribbled it down. ‘You’re the writer, yes? You know you don’t need to come backstage, you can just take your seat for the…’ ‘I’d prefer to have a word with Cass and Walter first,’ I s...

She kissed me like a tender touch of the rainy wind and vanished like the moon behind a dark curtain of clouds her love was just a dream like the dying sunset kissing the evening skies then she vanished like the wind romancing the sea waves in the immaculate beauty of the romantic night. Her love is just like the moonbeam kissing the elegant sea waves smiling from a distance as the seagulls sing a new anthem of love from eternity to eternity. by Gideon Cecil

I had thin arms as a boy. When I was about 11, I started doing biceps curls with a wooden beam in my father’s workshop. It weighed maybe ten or so pounds. I did hundreds of curls with that beam, hundreds. I did so many curls with the beam it became too light to give me a pump. So I added some weight to the beam, in the form of two stout salamis that my mother was curing in the cantina. They weighed a couple of pounds each and I tied them to opposite ends of the beam for balance. This worked. The added weight guaranteed that I got a pump when I did my curls. This was before barbells became a commonplace. Eventually, two salamis added to the beam were not enough. I had to add two more. My skinny, weakling arms were filling out and hardening into serious pipes. I started wearing tank tops and my little friends made comments about my arms. Look at his arms, would ya! They’re like Steve Reeves’! They’re like Popeye’s! Of course Popeye had huge forearms, but his biceps ...

Jemima occupied a box in my father’s study. It had once contained an Xpelair fan. The cardboard was quite thick with copper staples to keep it together. The texture set my teeth on edge. Perhaps that’s how they made cardboard in 1962. Jemima terrified me. She was about twenty years old compared to my five but I was taller. She walked at night. I could see her through the bed clothes that I drew up around my head for protection.  Her method of locomotion was necessarily unconventional. She had been decapitated and buried with a few pots of Roman provenance by the side of the ancient trackway that passed the front of our house.  Her skull was found between her knees, as if she was looking for her missing feet. In my imagination she walked with her skull perched directly on her pelvis.  Close by is the church of St Michael and all Angels, its name and unusual north-south alignment hinting at a pre-Christian foundation. The church was in the care of my father, the...

Your rod hung In lonely air, Extending further and Further. A seagull flew into it; Snapped it straight in Half. I thought you'd pursue Another hobby.  You sat upon freezing Pebbles, Weeping salt water. by Ellie Sparks

The bookmark is the part that I keep coming back to, perhaps because I think that it is the thing about the whole incident that says the most about me, the only thing that means anything. The exact placement of the bookmark, the way that I precisely, if quickly, wedged it into the book so that the bottom edge cleanly revealed a line of text and its top edge protruded out of the book at its customary surplus of about 1.5 inches. I was reading in the park, engrossed in a world very far from my own, but one in which I was reading a highly coincidental passage about a car accident. I’m sure that it means nothing that I was reading about an accident, but when I heard the bang of the collision, it was a shock to my mind as much as my ears. It was as though the life of the pages were playing out before me, and as I looked quickly up at the car accident coming to a stop only yards from the bench, I became very confused. I was already in action of course, as the papers went to great length...