Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

Bella’s haphazard lifestyle was the reason she was still alive. She didn’t know it, but her serial killer was a very punctual, precise man with a strict routine. He spotted her some nine months ago, running across heathland. It was 8.56am on a Monday morning. Next Monday she appeared at 8.30am, the Monday after at 9.03am.  Her serial killer noted these times in a little book and came up with an average. Not that ten minutes here or there really made much difference, but he liked things to be neat and tidy, as little room for error as possible. It was one of the reasons his career had been so successful and his work remained ‘unsolved’. On the fourth Monday she didn’t appear. On his way to the shops one Wednesday morning two months later, there she was. It was 10am. That screwed his average entirely. At first it annoyed him, but then it tantalised him. Cat and mouse. So, undeterred, he returned to his watching place every Monday between 8.29am and 9.05am. One Monday she arrived

Where did that word come from? I’ve asked this of myself many times -- the word that just slipped out, unbidden as an expletive you haven’t used in years – but now, this word you’ve never used in a poem before has hopped aboard the rolling poem and, strangely, adds a pleasing ride and comfort and sound that was not there. And when the final word falls into place in the poem’s last line with the sound of a latch on a closing gate, only then can you ask yourself where it came from and marvel, as you’ve often done, over the fuzziness of origins, and especially, that the word arrived at all. by Glen Sorestad