Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

A friend recently sent me a link to this wonderful article on the excellent blog, Writer Unboxed. It really resonated with me and reflected something true for the season, I think, which we tend to overlook. As ever, we should be taking our cues from Nature rather than our crazy hyped-up and currently rather unhealthy human society... Here is the article for those of you who are interested in the idea of allowing our creative side to lie fallow for a season and embrace it. Winter Rest All our best wishes from Cafe Aphra for this Christmas season and the end of 2017. Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

It’s an English party, on the remote island where we winter, and most of the guests are retired, like us. Our hostess greets us at the front door. In the living room, with its Persian carpets and paintings by talented imitators of Monet, our host encourages us to take a glass of wine. ‘So sorry you’ve been ill. I was ill too, you know. It lasted ten days. Flu.’ ‘Laryngitis. I can’t remember the last time--.’ ‘I’m never ill either. Champagne?’ He steers us to their long terrace. It’s standing time; mulling time; drifting from group to group time; talking about the weather time; performing oneself time; sizing up and deciding who it’s worth spending longer with when we sit down to dine. As always the men and women keep apart until they have drunk enough. An exclusive group of men sit on toffee-colour cane arm-chairs at the further end of the terrace. One has even been an ambassador. The less important men gather in groups scattered along the terrace away from the VIP’s. What do retired m...

And our personal Cafe Aphra favourite...

The summer of her tenth birthday, Lucie’s family went to live in the woods. It was her dad’s choice. Living somewhere beautiful was his heart’s desire, and Lucie’s too. She wanted Narnia, and this looked almost right.  Her parents tried hard to make the house decent. An old man and his son had lived there before. The son was grown up, but he had a Condition. When the old man died, the son was taken away, Lucie didn’t know where. When she found out that her bedroom had been his, she was scared. Supposing he hadn’t really gone? Or only out through the wardrobe, into the woods. If he’d done that, he could come back. At night she lay taut and silent, listening for warning sounds: footsteps, the clink of hangers, his hands peeling a path through her clothes.  She wished she could share a room with one of her sisters, but they wouldn’t have had that. They were both much older and Susan-ish; they didn’t want to live in the woods. They missed their friends, and shops, and ...

My desires are golden butterflies that I trap in the cobwebs of my wisdom. My desires, blossom, ripen, swell, explode. The seasons of my heart, raspberry crests on the tips of my breasts My desires, sailors sailing to the magical cave, in the depths of the rippling of the waves of my legs. The singing of the sirens pulls and calls to drop in and dive down to deep and depth explore. My desires Wings that tickle with soft whispering tongues My velvet-silk skin Butterflies have a brief life Raspberries rot Sailors drown Skin, grows old. by P. E. Cuberos

“This is something that’s been a part of my life from the beginning – this sense that we can’t keep living this way, this drive to do something about it, to change the system. It was my mum, see. I saw her get beaten by my dad at least once a week when I was little. And then I saw her beaten by the system again and again. And every time she tried to get back up, to help herself, the police sent her right back to him. And the courts wouldn’t help her either – she didn’t know where to turn, how to get help. So she turned to me. I was only ten. ‘Mikey my lad’ – she called me Mikey when I was little – ‘Mikey my lad, if I didn’t have you I’d have nothing.’ And I took that right to heart. Well you do, don’t you, when you’re that age? So I took it on myself to protect her: just her and me against the world, that’s how it felt. I’d try and get between her and my dad when he was at it, take some of the punches for her. No way I was strong enough to stop him. Eventually my dad overdosed and left...

It was a bright and placid day. Eric sat alone on his deck, watching the sun creep across the San Fernando Valley at its normal, slow-moving-vehicle pace. Eric was bored. This was not unusual. Eric had been bored for the past 5 years, 4 months and 3 days, ever since he sold his interest in the Fatburger franchising organization. Franchising had been fun for a while. Hooking new prospects and reeling them in had been more exciting than fly fishing, which he had tried for a while when he lived in Gunnison, Colorado right after college. Before long, however, convincing aspiring franchisees that they needed to commit to at least five outlets to make their investments pay off lost all its luster. He made enough money by selling out that he would never need to work again if he did not want to. He did not want to. He tried a variety of hobbies. He set up a woodworking shop in the basement and made German beer steins out of recycled bowling pins on a wood-turning lathe. He took pian...