Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

All of us grew up with some stories and they keep accompanying us throughout our lives as adults. Whether they are neatly bound in a book, put to moving pictures, sung on the radio or whispered on the phone -there are stories everywhere. Which kind of stories do you like?   I asked Afia Nkrumah, a London based writer and filmmaker, who has also contributed stories here at Cafe Aphra, the same question. Barbara: Afia, what kind of stories fascinate you? Afia:  I  am quite broad in my tastes when it comes to stories, if a story moves me, or makes me see life in a different way or challenges my assumptions then I am interested. I grew up hearing Ananse stories and other traditional tales, as well as my family history. Learning to read at the age of ten, was for me was a magical thing, I thought and still do today that it is a form of telepathy. One person puts their thoughts on paper and another person can read those thoughts across time an...

The land of mullets, that was Alaska to a T (with a long tail hanging down from the flat top) and particularly the case in Clam Point, a small community on the peninsula south of Anchorage. Fashion was traditionally twelve years behind Paris, Tokyo, New York and London (grunge only hit in 2003) but recently cable TV and the internet had resulted in people's clothing and hairdos being only a decade behind. That's when Molly, 17, asked her cousin to start sending care packages from London. Molly, atypically concerned with grooming in a state where fishing hip-waders counted as semi-formal, insisted that Carrie send her large packets bubble-wrapped and swaddled in brown paper, labelled A FASHION CARE PACKAGE TO CLAM POINT, ALASKA in big red letters, so the post office folks would realise that they were living in the style equivalent of an Alaskan glacier (inching forward while always regressing into the inevitable mullet) and, in Molly’s opinion, might do something about th...

I will grow up and then your turn will come.   In the garden. Stillness. On soft grass under trees, jacket for pillow, hand under head, Sons and Lovers, Late afternoon birdsong.   Door bangs. Door slams. Hurricanes out in heavy shoes, my father, red-eyed, hurls down steps. Hammering hands draw leather, rain lashes.   No rain in lashes. Lightning and thunder and stinging and strapping and cutting and bleeding. No soft rain in lashes.   Nose in grass, hands over head. ‘You saw her go. You did not stop her.’ Brown beer breath. Brown leather lashes. Heavy shoes, stomps steps. Door slam. Door bang. Hurricanes in.   Now only me, face in grass, Wet smell. Green smell. Red eyes. No more listening to her yelling and shouting and swearing and crying her pain. But soon –   Soon I’ll be grown up.  My fist drawing brown leather. Soon I’ll be your size And then your turn will come. ...